Heritage

It's still May--this is a belated tribute to my mother, who loved purple, as well as an enquiry about heritage.

You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.

Psalm 61:5

            That verse is a great comfort to me, an adopted child who has chosen not to connect with my birth family. I have no concept of my true biological heritage; a few details are clear, since mine was a privately arranged adoption and I have photographs—I look like my birth mother.

            My heritage from my adoptive mother was to have included her diamonds. She’d tried to press them on me many times before her death, after her hands had swollen and the metal of the rings grown thin. I’d always maintained that I was too young to wear diamonds, and they would be there when I was ready for them.

            Foolish obstinacy and blind faith! Those rings, some drugs, and a few other valuables were stolen while we were attending my mother’s funeral. The sense of rage and blight, of being dishonored—it had to have been someone who knew us, because we had not put the announcement of the time of the funeral in the paper. Someone had been watching the house. The police were not hopeful; this sort of crime happened far too often. A physical part of my heritage was irrevocably gone.

            Well, they were only rings symbolizing a marriage that had often been troubled, I told myself, so why would I want them? I could buy diamonds of a similar age in a consignment or antique shop if I really wanted them.

            We create heritage every day of our lives, and it’s not just about a robust financial portfolio. My mother worked very hard to keep her house so that she could give it to my brother and me. But the heritage I have from her is deeper than material things. I love having her silverware and utensils, her tablecloths and potholders—the common things of her life. Beyond that, however, I have received the heritage of a woman who made hospitality and unselfish giving into an art form.

            I’m not sure exactly what defines the heritage of those who fear God’s name. God doesn’t cut deals; those who fear God are subject to cancer and other illnesses, tragedy, grief, and death. Nobody gets a free pass through life. Perhaps, as in the case of my mother, the heritage isn’t about material things so much as it is about personality and character: the Godfearers are a particular kind of people, not an economic class of people.

            Now that cancer has made my own mortality real to me, I’m more aware of what heritage I will leave. I’m hoping that my words will continue to matter after I’m gone. I hope that the time I’ve spent with the young people in my church will continue to resonate for them, just as the gifts of time and teaching that my Sunday School teachers have done with me. As new oportunities to speak about cancer arise, I hope my words touch lives and bring hope and healing.

            We can’t know what heritage we leave. We can only work to make sure, in the language of a doctor’s pledge, that we “first, do no harm.” From there, we work to spread compassion and love, which may just be the heritage of those who fear God’s name.

Forgive Us Our Debts

I was teasing a colleague who was about to turn fifty and wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

            “Fifty is your jubilee year,” I encouraged, referring to a celebration commanded in the Hebrew Bible.

            “Wasn’t that the year when debts were forgiven?” he asked. “Maybe I should try explaining it to the bank that holds my mortgage. I wonder how far that would go.”

            That conversation got me thinking about the Lord’s Prayer, found in Matthew 6:9–13. “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,” Jesus instructed his followers to pray. Many of us are familiar with older translations that use the word “transgressions.” When we use the word debts, we’re not talking about financial obligations here.

            Forgive as we have been forgiven. In a parable in Matthew 18:21–35, Jesus uses a story to highlight the need to forgive others, knowing how much we ourselves have been forgiven. Peter asks if he needs to forgive a brother as many as seven times, and Jesus responds with hyperbole: seventy-seven, or seventy times seven, times.

Jesus then tells of a slave who owed his master the king more money than he could ever repay. In a time when a wage earner might amass a talent of money after fifteen years of labor, this man owed 10,000 talents. The king excused the debt, but the man left and demanded another slave pay a debt of 100 denarii, or 100 days’ wages. He has no pity on the man, and has him tossed into debtor’s prison. The story gets back to the king, who repents of his earlier generosity and has the first slave given over to be tortured.

I’ve been thinking about the need for forgiveness, the way we are to forgive not only others, but also ourselves. Many of us continue to torture ourselves with debts large and small from our past. We don’t feel forgiven, and we don’t feel we deserve forgiveness. We would never treat a friend the way we treat ourselves, never speak to a friend who’d asked forgiveness the way we talk to ourselves in our heads. We forget that God is merciful as well as righteous, that it is God’s gracious perogative to forgive huge debts (or transgressions) that we could never repay.

I had a counselor once tell me I was pulling a very heavy red wagon along behind me, with all the unforgiveness stacked up and weighing it down. Over several months of work together, she helped me unload that wagon and forgive, not only others, but myself.

Fifty is indeed the jubilee year, a time of forgiving debts. But any year in our faith lives can be a jubilee year as we set captives free and release heavy obligations. Even if we are our own jailers, as well as the captives.

Looking Through the Eyes of Love

Your love is always before my eyes.

Psalm 26:3, Book of Common Prayer

I remember coming to in the recovery room, scared to reach under the thin blanket to see if I had an incision in my abdomen. If the mass was cancer, during surgery to remove it, my doctor would have put in a port for intraperitoneal chemo. I could not check; I was too afraid.

As I gained consciousness, I was aware of a tall, dark-haired man standing to the left of the bed. His kind voice spoke four words: “Good news, no cancer.” Surely that was God’s love before my very eyes! I would not have to endure the indignities of cancer treatment. I could recover from surgery and go home, live my life. Even after he asked permission to send slides of my cells to a specialist at Harvard, I had a 90 percent chance of being cancer-free, because, as he told me, “Our guys in pathology are good. Ninety percent of the time, Harvard agrees with them.”

Over the next few weeks, instances that were obvious signs of God’s love were visible:

• the friend who sat all night in a recliner the night after my surgery, alert to my smallest movement

• others who visited, sent or brought gifts or food after I returned home, as well as those who helped me run errands or walk in the woods

• the amazing nurses and personal assistants who made a week in the hospital bearable, and the nurses who later made chemo bearable as well

• friends who read to me, in the hospital and after I went home

• the editor at my freelance job, who told me not to worry, the project was still mine

• my priest, who brought communion to the house, despite her cat allergies

At my post-surgery check-up, my gynecologic oncologist sat down and said, “It’s as we feared—it’s cancer.” So certain had I been in my escape that I’d refused an offer to join me in the examining room from the friend who had driven me to the appointment. Just me and my notebook of questions, most of which, as my doctor said, became largely irrelevant.

The time he took with me that day, and all the other days, was God’s love before my eyes, disguised in a long white lab coat. “It’s all good,” another survivor says. Some days, frankly, I have trouble with that idea. But I’m learning to see that it’s all God’s love, right there before my very eyes, if only I will look.

Mothers Day

 

Most years while growing up, I sat through Mother’s Day sermons based on Proverbs 31. In my Baptist world, the impossibly virtuous model was the Proverbs 31 woman, who seemed to me surely headed for a nervous breakdown or physical collapse. After reading her list of activities, I have to go lie down.

            The Proverbs 31 woman spun wool and flax, rose before dawn to fix breakfast, bought and planted a vineyard, worked late by candlelight, made clothes for herself and her family—tapestry yet—sold her fine linen, did charitable work, and was trusted and blessed by her husband and children. The chapter concludes “Give her of the fruit of her hands: and let her own works praise her in the gates.”

            I was reminded of this verse while smiling at the line of stuffed animals lining the top of my closet. My mother did a lot of the items in the Proverbs 31 list above and then some (there’s nothing in the list about glueing on airplane wings during World War II). In her retirement, she also made me a collection of fabric creatures: Victorian muslin rabbits, bears, a squirrel, cats, a swan and reindeer for Christmas. Some of them are clothed; the squirrel, for example, has a lovely plaid dress and tam. Others show off their print material bodies. Some days I want to pack them away, but I can’t bear the thought of closing their eyes to the world.

            Let her own works praise her. I still have some clothes my mother made me and a box of her recipes. I was telling my teenage helper about some of the things my handy mother could do, and was startled to hear her say, “She sounds like a neat person.”

            “Neat” was not a word I had ever applied to my mother. A friend once called her remarkable, and she was, though it took me a long time to know it. “Daughters are always hard on their mothers,” says a friend who is both a daughter and a mother to a daughter. I was hard on mine.

            My mother has been dead more than twelve years now, gone before my cancer diagnosis. She makes comments on occasion and may show up in dreams, though less frequently as time passes. I apologize to her sometimes; as I’m aging, I understand more of what her life was like at this age, when I was impatient as she sometimes slowed down, sometimes pushed herself harder. I wish we’d had more time together, wish I could replay some scenes and improve my relationship with her. Of one thing I am confident, though—she still thinks I’m the best daughter ever.

Of Opposums and Automobiles

In the baptismal service of the Episcopal church, we pray for the person to have “the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.” Grasping this gift isn’t always easy for me.

            One morning several years ago I was gently (and unintentionally) rebuked by a neighbor. She was cleaning out her storage space in the carport that the three apartments share; I was cleaning out my car before taking it on what would likely be our final ride.

            “I took the car in for an oil change yesterday, and it needs $1,500.00 worth of work. So I’m going to buy a new car today,” I told her.

            “Congratulations!” she said. “That’s exciting—like a gift.”

            How was it possible? A freelancer herself, with a son to support, she didn’t view this development as the ultimate tragedy of car payments resuming. Everyone else I’d talked to knew buying a car was a hassle, especially for a lone woman walking onto a lot. But this woman thought of it as a gift.

            And then she found another unexpected gift: an opossum had made a nest in her storage area and was in residence, nursing her young brood. Although my neighbor’s first reaction was “Ooooh—yuck!” she soon grew tender and commented that her son needed to see them. It took me awhile to find the creatures in the dark corner; I could hear the babies suckling before I saw the white fur and dark spots. I can appreciate the beauty of life continuing in the opposums’s precarious lives. They’ll nest anywhere that feels remotely comfortable.

            I’ve lived here long enough to have gotten pretty well past my fear of the critters wandering around their woods, where several decades ago people were so rude as to build homes. An opposum used to live under my porch in the crawl space; raccoons have made havoc of the boxes in my storage space. The heavy scent of skunk has awakened me some nights. I’ve also awakened early and seen deer passing a short distance from my bedroom window. I’m the intruder; they belong here, even if they give birth in a storage shed in a carport.

            I’d been dreading that day, which anyone could see was coming—my car is fifteen years old, and for nine of those years it’s had hard service with me. We—my mechanics and I—were going for ten years and a quarter million miles, but this is the end, a few months and 15,000 miles short of the goal. Metal can be as fragile as a newborn opposum.

            Buying myself the gift of reliable transportation wasn’t on my to-do list for the week, but sometimes God doesn’t seem terribly interested in my little timetables. On the other hand, God does care for the sparrow—and for infant opposums.

Struggling Against the Inevitable

I wrote this meditation some time ago; now I can't even remember what I didn't want to do, if I did it, and how it turned out. It seems that there are always new challenges to meet, however, so I am posting it now.

My friends are enjoying the sight of me struggling against the inevitable, while I sit here pouting. A tremendous opportunity has opened for me, and people are waiting in the wings to help make it happen. The problem is, I don’t want to do it. I don’t really have a good reason (read: logical, rational), I just don’t want to.

            The task will not be easy for me, despite those willing helpers. The situation reminds me of a small New Testament class whose members met around a conference table to dig into the text. I left most classes exhilarated, grinning, and nursing a massive headache—and I am not a person who gets headaches. At one point during a class, after we had worked through a particularly difficult passage, I put my head in my hands and softly whined, “It’s hard.” My professor overheard me, though I hadn’t intended him to, and looked up at me. “What? Of course it’s hard. Anything worth doing is hard,” he proclaimed, and we plunged back into the text. This thing against which I struggle now is, I know, very much worth doing.

            Saint Paul wrote to his supporters in Corinth, “A wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.” (1 Corinthians 16:9) Paul was speaking of outsiders who were making things difficult for him in another Greek city, Ephesus, where he was establishing a church. I am my only adversary in this particular case, but I can be formidable. I know my weak spots and how to scare myself out of what seems a golden opportunity.

            We are often our own worst enemies, endlessly repeating mental loops of old tapes telling us we can’t, we’ll fail, we’ll embarrass ourselves or our ________ [insert the group of choice: parents, family, friends, church]. To replace the fears with faith—in the God who made the “wide door,” in ourselves, in our supporters—takes imagination and courage.

            Along with being my own worst enemy, though, I see that I’ve already given myself a lifeline, like a spider spinning a strand for her web out of her own body. Job, suffering with both physical and spiritual afflictions once prayed, “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book!” (Job 19:23) I could tell him now, after having prayed that same prayer and seen it answered, Be careful what you pray for. No one has quoted me back to me yet, except the Spirit, who whispers over and over, “We are all of us, by the grace of God, more robust than we know.” I was so proud of that line, which closes my first published book. I knew the person who needed to read it, too, and it wasn’t me. I thought. Now it’s become the spider-web-strong line by which I can scramble up to the safety of my web’s center: the grace of God.

Torrents of Oblivion

The breakers of death rolled over me, and the torrents of oblivion made me afraid. . . .

[God] reached down from on high and grasped me; [God] drew me out of great waters.

Psalm 18: 4, 17 Book of Common Prayer

            I have a friend who may be facing serious surgery. In discussing her options, none of which were attractive, she matter-of-factly said, “There’s a real risk I’ll die during surgery.” That risk is genuine, which is why the hospital staff scared me half to death before my major surgery, with warnings about what could happen and many pieces of paper to sign indicating that I would not hold the hospital responsible if they did. I remember wrinkling my nose as the education nurse explained the likelihood of waking up with a tube down my trachea to help me breath. I didn’t want it, and didn’t need it, as it turned out.

            The Book of Common Prayer arranges the psalms for communal reading or chanting, which is why the verses I’ve listed likely will not correspond numerically with those in a Bible. But it’s the translation I read with breakfast, and it rivals the King James Version for sheer beauty of poetic language. (They were written about the same time, though both are updated periodically.)  This morning I noticed for the first time how these two verses line up almost parallel to each other on the pages of the open book (pages 602 and 603 in my copy).

            I also observed that the narrator is passive in these verses. That is, he or she is not the subject, the one acting, but the one acted upon: breakers rolling over, torrents making afraid—and then God at work, reaching, grasping, drawing him or her out.

The verses make me think of the anesthesized, passive patient during surgery, with its risk of death, its oblivion, however temporary. I will think of this verse the next time I face an invasive procedure. They do get easier—I’ve had seven or eight in the last five years—but they’re never without risk, without a tremor of fear. I’m not in control—I’m not even conscious—but God is there, acting through surgeons and nurses and anesthesiologists, through the radiologist who reads the scans and the lab technicians who examine my cells. I am not alone, left to be roiled by the breakers or to drown in the great waters. The mighty hand of God is holding onto me.