From a clinical perspective, we know that grief is exhausting. We tell the grieving to be gentle with themselves, to rest, and to drive carefully (if at all). We speak to each other of “self-care” when we grieve as pastors.
More and more I begin to understand the physicality of ministry as I age. As a result of my terrible struggle with anxiety and panic disorder five years ago, I have worked with mind-body spirituality a lot, guided and aided more by the Bible and Christian prayer practice than by the other therapies I have used and appreciated: including hypnotherapy, psychological counseling, breath work, massage, chiropractic care, medication and dietary adjustments.
It shocks me how little the mainline Christian church talks about Christ as medicine, Christ as healer of the incarnate body. I suppose that’s because we’re a bit embarrassed by the healing miracles, those irrational acts that scholarly Biblical criticism have analyzed unto the death, something I refer to as a “Crossan effect” (cue insider laugh here). I greatly appreciate John Dominic Crossan’s work but I think you know what I mean. We were schooled in that analytical, Western approach to the gospels.
In the Advent season so recently past, we celebrate the incarnate fact of Jesus, Emanuel, born among us in human form. And then, as far as I can tell, we treat our own incarnate bodies extra crappy for that season: rushing around, eating and drinking too much (or poorly), forcing ourselves out of bed in the dark and maintaining the same schedule on half the drastically diminished daylight. We oblige ourselves to participate in materialism, shopping, and adorning that we may or may not feel joyful about — and in fact, may regard with a degree of hostility and resentment.
Our bodies get sick. In myriad ways, they reveal their vulnerability, their reliance on the mind’s care and wisdom and on the spirit’s purity. By “purity,” I don’t mean holiness or piety or goodness, I mean the spirit’s clearness to discern, to bring harmony between what the mind decides and the body does, and in reverse: the spirit’s ability to use the mechanism of the body to speak truth unto the mind.
We have lost four members of our church in the past thirty days. You have all been there. I am not complaining – that is the way of community and we are privileged to know the stories of these people, have shared some of the deepest moments of their lives with them, and to be among the last human hands to touch them and voices to sing to them or pray with them. But there is a reason I walked to my study after yesterday’s funeral, closed the door, and sobbed. Because it gets to us. We do not know the time or the place. Sometimes you soldier on and really are fine. Sometimes a loss hits you much later. We are sea sponges in the living waters. I think it very inappropriate to openly weep during a funeral and I managed not to yesterday, but it required the use of mindful breath work and theatrical discipline of acting the part of the celebrant. Not easy, but that’s our job.
Today, after the interment in a beautiful historic cemetery, I got into the car and drove home. I had intended to go to the gym but I felt dangerously exhausted and knew I had to get right home. I did, and slept for several hours. Upon waking, I knew that I was no longer tired in body, or even in mind. I felt grateful for the sunny day, for the knowledge of two more beloved women at peace and beyond suffering, and just generally centered, calm and manageably sad.
However, my body felt like one of my dog’s toys does after he decides to “kill” it and take out its stuffing. I was just a pelt. Or, remember that Far Side cartoon of the Boneless Chicken Ranch? I was one of those chickens. No bones. Just flopping.
I had had a very intense and vivid dream that I knew I should record in my journal but I found that I lacked the energy to even manage my pen. I ticked off a list of things to do: make some phone calls to the special friends of the woman who had died that morning, work on my newsletter column, write my board report, prepare tomorrow’s class for those on the path to membership, and put away laundry. The idea was to motivate myself. The idea was to say, “These are things that need attending to. Why don’t you get started on at least a couple of them?”
But I just lay there on the bed, no stuffing. My mind was working. I was thinking, “What is this sensation? Because it is not tiredness and it is not grief. It is something unique to these times in ministry.” And a phrase came to me, “He felt his power go out of him.”
Yes, exactly. The psychic, metaphysical, spiritual, whatever-you-want-to-call-it aspect of ministry. The same mysterious aspect that I love from an early chapter in Mark that says something like, “Jesus knew they were gossiping about him by a prompting of the spirit.” I get those promptings of the spirit more and more with each passing year, and either the spirit is getting stronger or my faith and intuition are, because they are uncannily accurate. And they come through the body. I honor these sensations now — maybe that’s why they’re so accurate, because I’m listening better — and I want us to talk more about how our bodies are vehicles of God’s wisdom in ministry.
What I was feeling this afternoon was perfectly expressed in the phrase, “and he felt the power go out of him.” That is exactly what it was. I felt siphoned off, drained into someone else’s gas tank. Not a sick feeling, not a bad feeling, not a wrong feeling. Just a real feeling, a metaphysical sensation in my spirit body that enervated my incarnate body. This doesn’t mean that I think I’m Jesus. It means that Jesus was fully human, in that he could be psychically drained by someone who needed his healing. It means, for me, that the ancient gospel expression of this mystical experience and my contemporary experience of it connect over time and space. That deeply humbles and awes me.
There is a lot more we can talk about with this, but I am going to go to sleep now. Let me know what you think when you get a minute. Thank you for your recent comments lately — illuminating and loving of our work and our communities. God bless you, pumpkins.
God bless you too. Preaching on being renewed tomorrow, and your words this week will be part of that.
Yes. I know that feeling. It does seem to come more often with advancing age and it does demand attention.
Thank you for expressing it so eloquently.
God’s blessings, peace and healing to you.
Though not often, there have been times when I have openly wept at a funeral I was officiating. Sometimes, all the breathing, mindfulness, and self-admonition is for naught.
At those times I remember the Lazarus story…”See how he loved him” and I remember that, even in the midst of tears, Jesus performed a miracle.
Sometimes the managing not to cry has been the miracle!
For what it’s worth I think in those situations of extreme cosmic transition, we are called to hold the balance. Which means we incarnate whatever is required to do that. So we go into the ‘extreme’ on the other side. I think there is a sense that the world is coming apart and so someone has to hold to ‘normal.’ I’ve been told when I walk into a room with a dying person and their family “You make it all seem a normal, natural thing” – which it is but which is certainly not felt in those times. Having said that, once the ritual has safely lifted up and carried the mourner through the short term agony, we, or at least I, then have to retreat in order to rebalance myself…come back into myself….body, mind and spirit. My two cents (Cdn.)
I understand that feeling. I walked around feeling like a ghost for the days I was helping my mother and aunt care for my dying granny. I felt like a shell of myself. It was simultaneously one of the most awful and best things I’ve experienced.
Are you familiar with reiki? A trained practitioner facilitates the channeling of energy into and through your body. It’s very healing, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
It is such a blessing that you can share these thoughts even as you are enduring so much. It’s been healing for me to read these last several posts. Today I went on a lay Eucharistic visit with a dear friend and co-visitor. We were able to share some of the sadness we felt for the person we visited (we knew him before his debilitating stroke) and for our own relatives who are getting frail and facing death. There is a strange sweetness in coming together around these things, and I’m grateful that these feelings can be held up and spoken of.
Yep, definitely. As a hospital chaplain, I’m quite aware of this feeling.
From the little reading I’ve done around the subject, I think that Orthodox Christianity has done a better job than the Western Church of keeping hold of the idea of Christ as Healer. Might be worth looking into.
The symbol of Christ as healer can be helpful and meaningful but can also be really problematic for people with disabilities (whether or not they’re in the church.) It’s one of the more difficult symbols of Christ to use well, IMO.
Yesterday was one of those days for me…a four day trip to visit my aging and elderly folks, then home Saturday night, preached and celebrated twice on Sunday. Skipped coffee hour and came home to sleep and I did sleep. Then my phone rang and I made the choice to go and visit a parishioner who had received a diagnosis of cancer. We talked, we laughed, we shared the lord’s supper and he allowed me to anoint him. And in the quiet we felt Christ’s healing hands extending to all of us.
Be gentle with yourself and listen to your body. The “stuff” will wait. Your health will not.
xo
Thanks so much for sharing. This really helped guide my thoughts today. I am deep, deep in my Lent planning, for a congregation that has faced a lot of loss this year. We’ve decided to do a lighter Lent, to focus on “fasting” as a lightening, cleaning a “go easy on yourself” Lent, and then to focus more of the power on the weeks of Easter, to put more attention to the post-crucifixion, post-resurrection reality of living in a new reality with the center of your world in some ways absent, and in other ways more deeply present. [We might need to get another henna tattoo, Melissa. – PB]
Beautiful.
You wrote: Our bodies get sick. In myriad ways, they reveal their vulnerability, their reliance on the mind’s care and wisdom and on the spirit’s purity. By “purity,†I don’t mean holiness or piety or goodness, I mean the spirit’s clearness to discern, to bring harmony between what the mind decides and the body does, and in reverse: the spirit’s ability to use the mechanism of the body to speak truth unto the mind.
I’ve read this out loud over and over again; I have called up people to read it to them. Dear PB, if you ever get tired of writing about fluevogs, I hope you write more about this…because I need to read more about this. [Wow. Holy cow, that’s a huge compliment. I need to think about it more, okay? But thank you for asking, because I don’t always know where the juiciest stuff is until one of you points it out to me. – PB]