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Illness and Spirituality

Sunday Service - October 25, 10:00am
Rev. Julie Stoneberg

What’s the connection between our physical health and our spiritual health? Are they necessarily connected? What happens to our spirit when we are ill? Rev. Julie will speak of her personal experience with cancer.

Opening Words

Autumn Alert - The Rev. Robert R. Walsh
I have just returned from the northern woods and I bring alarming news. Something there is turning the leaves to red and gold...and it’s coming this way. Already here one can see signs. An unfamiliar coolness in the air. Sailboats being brought in. Just this morning a school bus went by. 
Take warning, friends. Every leaf in our fair town is doomed, and every green unfinished summer dream will now be foreclosed. We have had our fleeting summertime. 
Come friends. Come together and see the hope that the season brings. 
 

Reading

from Dancing in the Dark Fields: The Teachings of Illness by Zenshin Florence Caplow
This reading comes from “Inquiring Mind” magazine. The author is a Soto Zen priest who suffers from a chronic autoimmune disease. After telling of the changes in her life, and the dance she is always doing with her illness, she writes:
“Now I get to the tricky part: illness is a blessing, a gift. It’s taken me a long time to see this fact. I can remember snarling at someone, years ago, when they suggested that my illness might be a gift. Folks, a word of advice here: however much you may want to, refrain from making this suggestion to a sick person.   They won’t thank you. Finding the gift of an illness can only come from some genuine place far within. From without it feels like a way of minimizing the tremendous suffering of the person who is sick. I couldn’t call it a gift, not for years. It felt like a curse, actually, something entirely undeserved, unwarranted and unnecessary. I have to say that it still feels like a curse some days, but there are gifts too. And the greatest and hardest gift? The visceral, direct knowledge that life is not limitless, that tomorrow is completely unknown, and that, literally, there is no time to waste...
When death comes, we give up all our responsibilities, no matter how deep. Illness, too, can make it no longer possible to be “the responsible one.” Illness reminds us that we don’t have forever to take care of what most matters to us....
So, illness is a dance, an admonition, a curse, a blessing, the divine chosen deity. I would not wish it on anyone: it’s a rough, cruel road. Nonetheless, here I am. How can I not bow down to it? It has humbled me and stripped me bare; it has given me my true life.”
 

Message

 
I find it rather ironic that, for this Sunday, when the topic is Illness and Spirituality, I am sick. In advance, I ask for your blessings upon my sneezes and coughs, should they occur. The good news for me is that I may be able to hide my inevitable tears behind the guise of my cold. 
 
Last Saturday, I presented a short workshop in Hamilton as part of a leadership conference they were doing. My workshop was specifically targeted for members of their Ministerial Search Committee, and their Board. They wanted me to help them understand the ‘search’ process from the point of view of a minister, and specifically asked me to do this workshop because my experience is relatively fresh. 
(For anyone here today who might not be familiar with the language we use in this tradition...each Unitarian Universalist congregation is autonomous and self-governing, so when a congregation wants to get a new minister, they go into “search”, using a continental system which puts them into contact with ministers who are also in “search”, looking for a congregation.)
 
It’s now approaching three years since I had my first contact with this Fellowship’s Ministerial Search Committee. It is also just about three years ago that I had my first chemo treatment for breast cancer. Looking back on it, it is hard for me to believe that I was experiencing these two huge life processes simultaneously...aggressive treatment for what could be a life-threatening illness, and an active search for a settled ministry, one to which I expected to make a long-term commitment.   I was going through cancer treatment as a means of fighting off death, while also in a search process that inherently embraces hope for a new and fulfilling life. 
 
One way to look at this, I suppose, is that my search was part of my medicine. It was a hopeful, death-defying process that refused to let me consider (at least not for any prolonged periods) that such a search might be futile or that making a commitment to a congregation would be irresponsible. 
 
Again, today’s topic is Illness and Spirituality, and I promised to share a bit of my spiritual journey through cancer with you, and to reflect on the effects on and relationship between being ill and being a spiritual being.   But if you came today expecting an inspirational “Chicken Soup” kind of story, I’m afraid you’ll be sorely disappointed. What I learned as I journeyed with cancer is that I am not a highly-evolved spiritual being and that I have a lot of learning and growing to do.   But I also hope that what I have to share can help us all with that ever-present task of softening our hearts. 
 
In my work, I see a whole gamut of spiritual responses to life’s hardships. Right now, at least two members of this congregation are near death, and they are, of course, experiencing that passage in unique ways. And each of you, confronted with your own illness, or the illness of someone you love, has your own way of dealing with that reality. I’m not sure that I believe that there ways of coping that are necessarily better than others; one of our tasks is to allow others, and ourselves, to be where we are in the process and to be compassionate toward each person, wherever they are on the journey. 
 
So, maybe today’s message serves a purpose for me in helping me to be compassionate toward myself, because I’m not really very proud of, or happy with, the way I dealt with my cancer experience. 
 
Let me tell you about that. I was living temporarily in Thunder Bay, already feeling quite isolated and alone, when I got my cancer diagnosis. The most prominent reaction I had was one of fear, a prevalent and pervasive fear.   Immediately began a cycle of sleeplessness, something that I’d never really experienced before, and something that I still struggle with now.   On an intellectual level, I tried to remember that I am not afraid of death, and I honestly believe that I’m not. I am not afraid of death. So, what was I afraid of? I was afraid of the process...I imagined that it would be long and painful. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself and that I would have to rely on other people. I was afraid that I would be a drain on everything...health care resources, my friends’ and family’s time and money. I was afraid that I wouldn’t have health insurance. I was afraid of the unknown and the uncontrollable. (Maybe that doesn’t surprise those of you who’ve gotten to know me.)
 
You see, I’m a very independent person. I have learned to take care of myself, and because this is how I live my life, such independence has inadvertently become one of my highest values. It is a learned value that I am constantly trying to unseat from its throne....to move more toward interdependency.
 
Living out of that fear, I think, I became quite crabby. I don’t think the chemo nurses were ever very happy to see me. The smallest inconveniences, anywhere in my life, elicited an angry or snippy response. I didn’t like how I was acting, but I couldn’t seem to overcome it. The only sunny periods in those months were when friends came to be with me for surgeries and treatments; their presence calmed me and softened my heart.   They reminded me of all that I love about life. 
 
At the same time, I was continuing my ministry at the Lakehead Unitarian Fellowship. I mean, bless their hearts, they put up with me through a pretty rocky time. But goll darn it, I wasn’t going to be stopped by this cancer thing...I never missed a Sunday, although one week I did have to go outside right after the service to throw up. 
 
I’m taking some hospice training right now, and they tell me that at the time of illness, a person’s interest in, or openness to, spirituality increases. I suppose that makes sense, doesn’t it? We become ill and are faced with our own finitude, and suddenly, our desire to connect with something beyond our limited existence grows.   The daytime non-fiction book club has recently read a book called “Nothing to Be Frightened Of.” The author, Julian Barnes, contends that a ‘wake-up call’, such as a cancer diagnosis, is a necessary turning point in a process toward an awareness of our mortality. 
 
You can imagine that I read this book with great interest. I was drawn to being assured that there was, indeed, nothing to be frightened of. But alas, I think all of us in the book club agreed that he didn’t have anything startlingly wise to say...except that this process of living and dying has gone on and on for all time, that we are all part of this much larger process, that our individual lives matter and don’t matter simultaneously. Oh wait, maybe this is pretty wise.   
 
I’ve been so inspired by, touched by, the way that certain persons have faced death. Pat Strode is one of those people. Rev. Forrest Church is another.   But to be fair, it is just because their outward expressions have been positive and upbeat. We can never fully know what is going on in the recesses of one’s heart.   I remember a conversation following the death of a friend, a friend who was quite a bitter person...sardonic and negative... who, drunk on a winter’s night, fell and broke his leg. The resulting hypothermia and a blood clot killed him.   In processing what had happened, someone suggested that it was a shame that he had died without resolving that bitterness. Another person responded with a reminder that we can never know the state of his heart at the time of death. 
 
Some Buddhists believe that it is really only this moment, the exact moment of passing from life to death, that matters in terms of what kharma you bring into the next life.   This seems pretty random to me...yes, a person could, through practice, increase the chances of being in a loving kindness state of mind when death comes. But it is only natural to respond, for example, to an inevitable collision, with an “Oh Shit!” I’d hate to think that this would blow one’s chances for a more enlightened next life... should there be such a thing as a next life. 
 
I’ve tried...through journaling, through mediation, through reading...to get at the heart of my fear and crabbiness. Pema Chodron, in her book “The Places That Scare You”, speaks of bodhichitta...an attitude of heart and mind that transforms even the hardest places. She suggests that anger and fear is a hard armour, and under that armour, in everyone, exists the tenderness of genuine sadness. She says that this sadness is our link with all those who have ever loved, and that it is this sadness that can teach us great compassion. 
 
Something in this rings true for me, but as such a novice in the quest for enlightenment, it also confuses me. Sadness begets compassion?   None of us are very keen on going about our lives in a state of sadness.   But maybe this is not a sadness of regret, or a sadness of depression. I don’t know for sure, but I think this is a sadness born of a deep understanding of impermanence, a deep reckoning with the fact that suffering is a part of life.   And when we truly ‘get’ this, then we also acquire a richer compassion for all other beings.   When we figure out we truly are all together in this boat of suffering, then we begin to see that our boat sails on a sea of love and compassion...a sea that accepts all that is.
 
Naomi Shihab Nye has written a beautiful poem entitled Kindness...
Before you know what kindness really means, you must lose things. 
You must feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so that you see how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you; how he too was someone who traveled through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up to sorrow. You must speak to it until your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then, it is only kindness that makes any sense any more. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread. Only kindness that raises its head above the crowd of the world to say, “It is I you have been looking for,” and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
 
She’s saying the same thing as Pema Chodron. You must find the sorrow and become completely comfortable and accepting of it before the kindness, the compassion, can really grow in you. This kindness, this compassion, is something we universally recognize as a trait of an evolved spirituality. 
 
Me? Well, I think I have not yet moved very far along the path. I think I am just beginning to understand the sadness. I think that I have not yet begun to show my own self compassion for the less than advanced place I am on the journey.   And still, I have an enduring faith in my potential, in your potential, to continue to grow and evolve in the ways of love. 
 
My main point for the committee in Hamilton, the one thing that I wanted to get across, was that their match with a new minister is more likely to be a good one if they are honest about who they are, and present themselves and their congregation as transparently and sincerely as possible. This, I told them, would encourage any minister with whom they correspond to also be open and honest...and in this way, they could enter into a relationship with eyes wide open...or at least as open as we can ever get our human eyes, and hearts, to be.
 
In late February 2007, I came to Peterborough for the first time, and spent a snowy weekend with your Ministerial Search Committee.   I had recently completed a full course of chemo, and was one appointment shy of completing a course of radiation. I was bald. I mean, how much more open and honest about oneself could a person be? 
 
I cannot understate the power of your Search Committee’s reciprocal openness. I would not be here today if they had not seen something beyond the cancer, the illness. I would not be here if they had not had a healthy dose of that bodhichitta energy, a softness that saw my struggle as part of the larger struggle of all of us.   Herein lies spirituality...that ability to see that each of us is part of, and responsible to, something beyond our own individual lives, our own private pain, our own myopic view. 
 
I close with these words found as the cover page in Pema Chodron’s book:
Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find repulsive.
Help those you think you cannot help.
Anything you are attached to, let it go.
Go to places that scare you.
For indeed we go there together. 
 
May it always be so.
 

Closing Words

Jim Cohen, from Life Prayers            
 
You carry the cure within you.
Everything that comes your way is blessed.
The Creator gives you one more day.
Stand on the neck of Fearful Mind.
 
Do not wait to open your heart.
Let yourself go into the Mystery.
Sometimes the threads have no weave,
The price of not loving yourself is high. 
 
Amen. Go in Peace and good health.