Wednesday of 4 Easter

 April 20, 2005

Chapel of the Resurrection

Gethsemane Cathedral Fargo

Luke 6.27-38

As some of you might know, I’ve been writing a book. IN fact, I just finished it. The book is entitled, In the Bleak Winter: A Priest and Poet Faces his Cancer.

 As some of you know, I was diagnosed with cancer a little over three years ago and this book is a response, in a sense, to my illness.

 I don’t usually inflict my writing on anyone who doesn’t ask for it, but I have shared bits and pieces of the book in these Wednesday sermons and so today’s no different.

 There’s a chapter in the book that, in many ways, responds to this gospel reading we heard from Luke.

 So, I’m just going to read you a bit from this chapter.

 

 If there is one thing both poets and priests need it is thick skin. Poets need this protective skin simply dealing with critics of their work. A poet should, to some extent, put their very soul into their work and because they do, any criticism of that work tends to cuts them to their core. This, however, is the stark reality of being a poet. Every poet worth their weight needs to face the critics with a certain inner strength if they are ever going to persevere. They need to be able to take the criticisms and still somehow find the strength to get up the next morning, sit down at the desk and start writing again—no matter if one feels like it or not. I learned this lesson fairly early in my writing career and was able to develop and hone this guard.

Not everyone, of course, has however been able to take on this thick skin. When I was in graduate school, I was amazed when, in poetry workshops in which dismantling and critiquing a poem becomes a razor-precise procedure, I saw more than one poet break down in tears or lash out in anger at those critiquing his or her poem. Once, a young woman threw her cup of (thankfully lukewarm) coffee at the offending critic and stomped out of the room screaming a string of obscenities.

            Likewise, a priest must simply face the fact in his or her career that some people simply are not going to like them. I once heard at a conference on pastoral ministry that the average pastor should expect 25% of their congregation to dislike them. Of that 25%, the pastor should be aware that 10% will downright hate them. I don’t know how accurate these figures are, but it is a fact of life as a priest that not everyone is going to like that sermon you preached last Sunday or that someone is going to find fault with your demeanor at the altar or someone just can’t stand how you sing. More often than not, there will always be one person who will be out to get you because you didn’t make a visit to the hospital to visit someone’s mother.

A priest friend of mine once told me that a parishioner came up to her one Sunday morning after Mass and said they hated everything about that service, but what they disliked about it most was her grating voice and how it sounded in her microphone. My friend was devastated by this comment and confessed to me that part of her never wanted to step foot in front of those people ever again. 

            Neither of these vocations—poetry writing and the priesthood—are popularity contests and anyone who thinks they are is setting themselves up for a major fall. In both areas, one deals with similar levels of pettiness, backbiting and downright meanness. 

            Being keenly aware of this in my own live, I have long prided myself on the callused skin I developed in these areas of my life. As a poet, harsh critiques of my work have very rarely devastated me, even if on occasion the offending critic was a personal friend.

            Having been a poet for years prepared me well, in many ways, for the criticisms of being a priest. When it came to the Church, I was able to easily shrug off the bitterness or coldness I sometimes received from parishioners who, for whatever reasons, simply did not like me.

I also made a point of never letting church politics get in the way of personal friendships. Often a friend and I might disagree on some situation within the Church structure—and sometimes we might disagree vehemently and vocally in a public arena. However I had no problem having a drink with that same person afterward in the hotel bar, laughing with them as if nothing happened. One parishioner I knew was shocked once on going to a Diocesan Convention in which a controversial motion had been put forward. At one point during the proceedings, one delegate and a priest debated the issue with a passion that made some fellow delegates cringe. This parishioner was shocked later to find this same delegate coming up to the priest afterward and asking her if she could baptize his baby in the near future.

            Having bragged here in writing about my callousness to criticism, I will admit there have been times my defenses have failed me and failed me miserably. One of the first times my thick skin failed me was following an argument I had with a friend I cared for deeply. Immediately after our dispute, I went away thinking it had been just another tussle in our long and trusted relationship and that, after a few days of cooling off, we would simply call each other on the phone, clear the air and simply resume our friendship as before, never mentioning the argument again. Certainly I knew this person as well as I knew anyone, after all. In fact, I probably knew him better than I knew myself at times for that matter—or so I thought. A few days later I was devastated  when I received a four page single-spaced letter from him, filled with a vehemence and an anger that literally knocked the breath from me. I sat in the  car that afternoon after picking up the mail, literally shaking with shock after  opening the letter and reading the first sentence. It was the kind of letter that took me hours to read. I could only read a sentence or two at a time before I had to set it aside, try to adjust to the feeling of unreality I was experiencing, catch my breath and continue on. To say the least, it was a long and tortuous experience.

            In the letter, my friend—a person I had been confident up to that very moment cared for me almost as much as I cared for him—lashed out at me with such anger I thought I was going to break into pieces. Because he knew me so well, he was able to use particularly sensitive facts about my life and our relationship to drive home the pain being inflicting on me. Even now, after almost nine years, thinking about that letter hurts me deeply.

            At the time, his letter sent me into a tailspin. It literally knocked me flat. I went around in a sort of blank-eyed daze for days afterward. Any pretense of a thick skin quickly evaporated in the wake of that letter.

            Why, you might ask, would I react as I did to a letter? Partly it was because I had never had anyone I even remotely cared for lash out at me in quite that way before. This friend was one of the few people I had allowed to get that close to me, and to have them feel anger toward me was excruciating. I had let down the usual defensive guards I raised with friends. I had opened myself up in this friendship as I never had in a platonic friendship before.

If it was someone I didn’t care for—if it was someone I felt even a little bit for—I would’ve either shrugged it off or fired off an equaly hurtful letter. But not so in this case. I could not write a similar letter back because I simply did not feel any anger toward him for it. This was how he felt. I accepted that and, in return, all I could feel was hurt and shocked.

In the weeks that followed, I found myself taking to heart the words of Psalm 55. Even to this day when I pray that psalm, I am reminded in a very unique way of that difficult time in my life.

 

            For had it been an adversary who taunted me,

            then I could have borne it;

                        or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me,

                        then I could have hidden from him.

 

            But it was you, a man after my own heart,

                        my companion, my own familiar friend.

           

 

Rather than lash out at my friend, I did what I knew better than to do—I turned it all inward on myself. Maybe he was right, I thought. Maybe I truly did fail in our friendship as he accused.  After all, he should know, shouldn’t he? How could I have been so thoughtless to destroy this friendship that meant so much to me? Maybe I had been too possessive, too dependent, too needy. Certainly I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that kind of a relationship. It was difficult and it was draining and as a result of it, the relationship could eventually erupt from the pent-up frustrations and anger.

This all led to another reason I was so upset by the letter: I had been clueless up to that point how my friend really felt for me. I had assumed to some extent that he cared for me at least somewhat as much as I did for him. But what came across in this letter was an anger that had been brewing for some time, possibly even years. It was something akin to hatred—hatred of me and hatred of everything I was. I didn’t know how to react or process a feeling like hatred, and certainly not from a friend.

Henri Nouwen had a similar experience with a friend, which he chronicled in his amazing book, The Inner Voice of Love. This book is one I have read and re-read over and over again and each time I do, I am moved to tears by it. It has been a book that continues to speak to me on many levels. The dissolving of  Nouwen’s  friendship in question  precipitated a complete emotional breakdown for him. Only after he had recovered was he able to put the whole situation in perspective. Only then was he able to look at it in all honesty. For him,

“this deeply satisfying friendship became the road to my anguish, because soon I discovered that the enormous space that had been opened for me could not be filled by the one who had opened it…and when the friendship finally had to be interrupted, I fell apart. I felt abandoned, rejected and betrayed. Indeed, the extremes touched each other.”

 

For days after my friend’s letter arrived, I went around in shock. I didn’t know how to react to it. Being angry was pointless. Besides, there was simply no anger there. I simply felt hurt in a way I never had before. I felt torn apart from the inside out. I literally ached.

In fact, the long-range effects of the letter stayed with me, in some shape or form, for years afterward. Although my friend and I eventually reconciled and were able to rebuild our friendship, the fact remained that it would never be the same way it was before. In the years that followed, I found myself reevaluating every important friendship in my life. No longer could I assume that those whom I loved, loved me in return anymore. No longer could I be assured of how anyone felt for me. I also became more careful of how I acted around people. Was I being too pretentious, too full of myself, too prying in my friends’ lives? Was I manipulating them without even knowing it?

Although I have come to realize that my friend wrote the letter in a deep anger—an anger that eventually passed—the damage had been done in an irreparable way. I often use the word wounded to describe what I felt in the shadow of that letter. I was wounded in a deep place. That wound would and could be opened easily in the ensuing years.

When the poet Audre Lourde died of cancer in 1992, her oncologist spoke at a memorial gathering for her. He said, “cancer is caused from a deep wound.”

We’ve all heard stories about how it is believed that some people who are diagnosed with cancer have been suffering from wounds deep within. A good friend of my mother was one of those people I came to know intimately. About five years before her diagnosis, her only daughter was shot and killed by her husband who then committed suicide. After my diagnosis, which followed her’s by about a year, we often talked about what it was like to have cancer and conjectured about what caused it.

“I have no doubt that the day Emily died, the cancer started,” she said. “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the cancer started growing from that moment on.”

Certainly she believed this was the cause of her cancer until the moment she died two years later.

Now I, in no way, believe that my cancer was caused from the wound of that letter or from any other psychological wound. The only reason I bring it up in this context is simply to state that that I do believe my cancer, however, did open the wound that already existed, unhealed, within me, as well as others like it in a way I never thought possible.

The night before surgery, as I laid in bed, I felt these wound bleed anew within me in a unique way.  The thick protective layer I was once so proud of was long gone by this point. Instead, I laid there, exposed to every fear, every pain, every unhealed wound.

That night, I thought of my friend, who I still cared so deeply for, as well as my parents and so many other people I cared for, and I thought about all the times I had hurt them or let them down. I thought about the parishioners over the years who had never really liked me, all the variety of critics who had trashed my work over the years, and those who betrayed me or made concentrated efforts to hurt me. Because the termination of my job was still so fresh in my mind, I thought of the betrayal by people I trusted and respected, of people who were, by vow and vocation, required to look out for me and who did not. I thought of the woman of the Vestry of the last church I served who bragged—proudly proclaimed, in fact—to a mutual friend that her’s was the deciding vote on whether to lay me off or not and how, without a second thought, she voted against me. I thought of the warden who was rumored to have given the final sentence to my job by saying, “Just get rid of him, then.” I thought of those cold shoulders and the even colder silences I received from people over the years. I thought of the shaky relationships I had with my half-siblings and of all those former friends who simply passed out of my life quietly, without another single word or gesture.

I laid there in the dark, bleeding in a way I never had before. I gave into all the self-pitying and pain that had been festering under the surface through all of those years of bragging about my supposedly impenetrable outer armor.

It was then that I cried for the first time since cancer had reared its ugly demonic head. I laid there, heaving with pain, the burning tears pouring from my eyes in a way I never remembered them coming before.

Strangely, through the long ordeal of that night, I never once felt alone. I remembered what I had been taught about those past pains—about what I told others over the years who were in similar situations. In a sense, I found myself pastoring myself. 

In my prayers that night, there was no pleading, no bargaining. I simply offered that deafening shocked silence inside me to God. It was all I could do. It was all I was capable of doing. Inside, I was in a pain I had not felt for years.  I did with that pain the only thing I could do—I offered it to God. I lifted it up and placed it in that calm silence that lay before God’s all-encompassing presence. It was then I realized something: here I was, a priest, lying awake the night before my surgery—in an anguish I had only felt a few times before in my life, doing the only thing I could do—what I as a priest was trained to do. I offered what I had to God.

            How many times in my past had others come to me in very similar situations, asking for prayers for lumps on breasts or mysterious fevers, asking me to pray that it would all would turn out fine, that all would be well for them, if it’s Your will, O God.

            But when it came to my own Growth, when it came to my own anguish, I couldn’t pray for it to be taken away. I could only acknowledge it and accept it and offer it to God in much the same way I had accepted and offered to God the pain over my friendship.

            In offering all my fears—all the still bleeding wounds—to God, I felt a certain level of relief. I was releasing them to some extent—at least temporarily. I felt the pains subside and a comfortable numbness settle on me. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t healing. It wasn’t a miraculous change of heart. It was simply a reprieve. It was a kind of “eye of the storm.” 

            It was that reprieve that eventually helped me to sleep that night. It cushioned me in a way that I unconsciously needed. I went into that sleep, knowing full well that when I would awaken the next morning, I would be facing this difficult surgery and that this deceptively calm “eye” would have passed away.