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+ Healing within Hospice
+ Coming About: A Personal Story
+ Reflections on Reconciliation as Healing
Amy Gordon, Triangle Hospice Volunteer Coordinator
Whenever we ... choose to embrace not only our own mortality, but also other people's, we can become a true source of healing and hope. When we have the courage to let go of our need to cure, our care can truly heal in ways far beyond our own dreams and expectations. With our gift of care, we can gently lead our dying brothers and sisters always deeper into the heart of God and God's universe.Henri J. M. Nouwen -- "Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation of Dying and Caring"
After two years as Christian Education Director at the Chapel of the Cross, I entered the world of Hospice work. I am the Volunteer Services Coordinator for Triangle Hospice. It has been a wonderful learning and working experience. The staff and volunteers are caring, compassionate individuals who have a real heart for end of life care. I am privileged to work in this environment of healing.
Hospice is a concept of caring derived from medieval times, symbolizing a place where travelers, pilgrims, and the sick could find rest and comfort. The contemporary hospice's mission is to help the dying die with comfort, dignity, and love, and to help survivors cope both before and after the death.
Hospice emphasizes palliative care for the whole person rather than curative treatment for the body only. To say the body cannot be cured does not negate the potential for healing in other aspects of one's being. As we die, as when we live, we have a variety of physical, spiritual, emotional, and social needs.
Death is an absolute we will all experience. The breaking of our bodies cannot be avoided. But the potential for growth and healing in our spirit, our emotions, and our community remains throughout. As we lie dying we are still alive. Fear, sadness, memories, hopes, doubts, questions, the needs of our loved ones, the edges of our faith are all as present in sickness as they are in health. Each day, perhaps even each moment, our opportunities to know life more deeply rely on the efforts of our own being. Our own intentions are perhaps all that we can control.
The end of life provides the unique challenge of letting go in such a final way. It is not a small loss; it is the loss of everything we know. Hospice recognizes that dying is unique for each individual. The hospice team strives to be sensitive and responsive to the special requirements of each individual and family, to honor their desires and intentions, and to always treat the dying person as a living person -- as a full human being.
When our body or the body of one we love lies broken -- when we cannot fix it, or change it -- there remains hope for healing. It is the hope that there is more than "everything we know." There remains a prayer for healing.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy Spirit from me. Give me the joy of your saving help again and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. (Psalm 51)
Brian Stabler
The following article, written by parishioner Brian Stabler, is reproduced with permission from the January 2001 issue of "In Touch, the Good Health Guide to Cancer Prevention and Treatment."
In the summer of 1990 I was diagnosed with low-grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Given the stage of my disease, I had little reason to believe I would live even one more year. The days were a sea of despair and apathy. I moved about in a fog, unfocused and deeply sad.
I make a living as a clinical psychologist, working with others to relieve the stress in their lives. But when I became the patient, I found myself emotionally ignorant and clumsy. None of my professional advice came to my own rescue. This was a life battle, but I seemed to have come to the task unprepared, without weapons or defense of any kind. My attitude toward recovery was pessimistic and passive. I was stranded, my energy flagging, and I needed help from another source.
I'm not a deeply religious man. But I met with the minister of the church where I occasionally worshiped. I needed to win back some sense of optimism. "How do people like me find hope?" I asked him. He told me about Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who was a pragmatic man. Saint Ignatius believed that to find a state of hopefulness, you needed to pray for something specific and that you should be prepared for your prayers to be realized in unexpected ways and at unanticipated times.
That made sense to me. So my minister and I prayed together for a few minutes in his study. I prayed for a change in my life to occur, and I remember a picture forming in my head, of a sailboat changing course, or, as sailors say, "coming about." I envisioned myself sailing that small boat, changing course, changing direction, away from illness and possible death, and toward a new plan.
As I was leaving his office, the minister's telephone rang. I bade him goodbye, but he beckoned me back, saying the phone call was for me. It was my wife. She had been frantically trying to reach me.
My doctor had just called with news: Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston was testing a new treatment, one that could potentially cure my condition. I fit the requirements for the study and I was to start preparing immediately at our local hospital.
Putting the telephone down, I felt a vivid sense of disbelief. How could this possibly be happening? Then relief and joy swept over me like a warm coat on shivering shoulders. I looked at my minister and it was clear to both of us what was happening. He smiled but said nothing.
I walked out into brilliant sunshine feeling joyously optimistic for the first time since my diagnosis. Suddenly there was the possibility that things might improve, that my life would be spared and I could go on. The sun stung my eyes and lifted my heart as I walked toward the hospital.
Hope, I have learned, waits to be found, like the winds a stranded sailor must seek in order to come about. It has to be pursued, but as often as not, it's found by chance. It is true that chance favors the prepared mind -- and the prepared heart.
The Community of the Cross of Nails: Reflections on Reconciliation as Healing
Susan Mann
On March 25, 2001, the sister parish relationship of the Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church and St. Paul AME Church was honored with the designation, "Cross of Nails Center." On that date, both churches received symbolic crosses constructed from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, England. Our local center thus became one of many such centers, each one chosen because of a particular community's effort to reconcile one of the many divisions in the body of Christ. Our local center attempts, through shared worship and fellowship, to bridge the divide between white Christians and black Christians, the divide between the Episcopal community and the African Methodist Episcopal community. Other centers attempt to reconcile a variety of other divisions. There are centers that address international conflicts, those that promote interfaith dialogue and understanding, and at least one that provides community supports for families broken by domestic violence and divorce.
Here in Chapel Hill, we are fortunate to be well connected with both the national and international organizations of the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN). The Rev. Stephen Stanley has served on the national board of directors and has recently been elected as Vice President of Cross of Nails--USA. Pam Gibbard is the Webmaster for Cross of Nails USA and her work can be found at www.ccn-usa.org. They and other local members of CCN are significant contributors to the local, national, and international work of CCN.
Recently we asked our local CCN participants for some of their reflections on the reconciliation work of Cross of Nails and how this relates to the broader concept of healing. Here is a sampling of the reflections of our local membership.
Joyce Roland of St. Paul AME: "Our sister parish relationship is an example of a community attempting to bring about racial healing. It brings about healing, reconciliation, renewal, new understandings, and a respect for differences. We also see the healing that can take place across generations, as is happening with the Creating Connections Program. This program brings young people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds together. It also helped them to connect with older people in our community who may have a different view of youth. These gaps need to be and can be bridged."
Jerry Markatos: "The people of Afghanistan are mostly people of little material wealth but have a strong culture. We need to support their sense of family and look for small ways to help them beyond the war atmosphere both the former Soviet Union and US policies have in part produced. The people need honest work and freedom from harsh Taliban forces, which many people in our country would encourage if they only could. Hurrah for all the Cross of Nails members who speak to groups of people who come from different cultural backgrounds and help create a good atmosphere for discussion and problem solving."
Pam Gibbard: "What comes to mind for me is the healing from forgiveness -- both for the forgiver and the one being forgiven -- for that matter, the healing from telling the truth (for all who will speak it and/or hear it) and as is often quoted in CCN, 'truth + forgiveness = reconciliation.'"
Sandy Worth remembers a quote from Reynolds Price, a description of his personal experience in faith and healing ("Time," Dec. 6, 1999). "I was transported, thoroughly awake to another entirely credible time and place. Waist deep in water I felt him [Jesus] pour handfuls down the long fresh scar on my back -- the relic of unsuccessful surgery a month before. Jesus suddenly told me 'Your sins are forgiven.' Appalled by my dire physical outlook I thought 'That's the last thing I need'; so I asked him 'Am I also cured?' He said ' That, too.' "
Bob Millikan quotes Martin Luther King: "Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil. The greatest way to do that is through love. I believe firmly that love is a transforming power that can lift a whole community to new horizons of fair play, good will, and justice." "Fellowship," 22: 5-7 (1956).
And last, but not least, from Judy Watkins: "CNN is concerned with the healing of relationships, which is only possible when both sides, whether individuals or countries, recognize that there is wrong on both sides, and that reconciliation is worth the pain of looking at it together in order to build something new and enduring, building a relationship that is stronger than before the rift. Those deeply involved in CNN, it seems to me, have been willing to look for the best in the other side and sacrifice to build anew, taking the example of Our Lord. It may be the one hope for this world today."
© 2002: Chapel of the Cross
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