Guide for Grief, 2: Rodger Murchison and grief ministry

September 24, 2011 by

ROGER MURCHISON, author of Guide for Grief, prepares for a television interview about the launch of the book and online community of readers sharing ideas for grief ministry, which will expand through 2011-2012.Why read about grief?
Because everyone dies and, before that, everyone grieves.
We are helping!
ReadTheSpirit is proud to publish Guide for Grief: Help in Surviving the Stages of Grief and Bereavement after a Loss.” This book represents years of work by Georgia-based pastor Rodger Murchison, who earned his doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary specializing in ministry with grieving families. His research into grief counseling now spans work in both American and British universities, including Oxford University. This week, we are publishing Guide for Grief; we encourage you to order a copy by clicking on the book cover below.

PART 1 in this introductory series is Editor David Crumm’s report on the importance of grief ministry.
PART 2, meet Rodger Murchison as he personally introductes Guide for Grief.
PART 3, coming soon, is our ReadTheSpirit author interview with Rodger Murchison.

Rodger Murchison’s
Own Introduction to
“Guide for Grief:
Help in surviving
the stages of grief
and bereavement
after a loss”

Timothy often took a lawn chair to the cemetery to sit by Sally’s grave and talk to her. He’d tell her what he had been doing and how much he loved her. He often left the cemetery in tears. They had been married 32 years. Two years after her death, Timothy still grieved her loss. The grief was understandable and even the frequent cemetery visits. Then, I discovered that he broke off every new relationship in his life and his cemetery visits were a time when he cleansed himself of guilt he felt for allowing new friends into his life. Something was wrong. Timothy was stuck in grief.

Millions of people seek out pastors and other counselors after the loss of loved ones, asking for help in moving through their journey with grief. Most stories are not as unusual as Timothy’s. Sometimes, people find themselves stuck in other phases of grief. After a heart-breaking loss, many people lash out in anger at God—a normal part of the grieving process—but some turn this anger into a mantra of woe. Their anger at God over their loss can spill into every area of their lives.

While the process of grieving varies widely, it does follow predictable patterns for most people. When the progression toward healing is obstructed, people need help in getting unstuck.

Most Americans have heard that there are “stages” to grief, typically referring to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ landmark five-stage process: denial, anger, bargaining, guilt or depression and acceptance. But most people are unaware of the ever-growing body of research into grief. There are other ways of describing and engaging with the predictable patterns of grief. There are many well-tested techniques that can be helpful. A person who is stuck in grief may be assuming that Kübler-Ross’ five phases are set in stone—a staircase out of grief chiseled out for everyone in all situations. If they find themselves looping back through phases, or skipping others, they may become discouraged that they are not correctly marching up the steps. We can make a big difference in people’s lives simply by helping families understand that there are various models for grief and our journey is not as clear-cut as climbing a staircase.

Because Americans fear aging and dread the inevitable truth of death—few of us learn about or prepare for the end that comes to all of us. Professionals have developed a wide array of counseling techniques to help people move through this universal journey of grief. In this book, I explain a number of these techniques for general readers—such as “reframing.” Using this technique, people are invited to focus on their loss from a fresh perspective. This does not bring our loved one back to life. What changes are the ways we look at our loss, understand the loss, and respond to the loss. Just as a painting takes on new dimensions when given a new frame, people who reframe their grief can discover new sources of strength.

This example of reframing is both wise psychological practice and a truth deeply rooted in scripture. The author of Hebrews tells us: “If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desired a better country.” (Hebrews 11:15-16) Instead of bemoaning the loss of comforts in their previous land (as the Moses-led Israelites did many years later), the writer of Hebrews is telling us that Abraham’s people trusted that God was leading and blessing them. For Abraham, the “promised land” was more than a new place in which to dwell, it was also a reality of mind and heart—reframing life in the belief that God had called him to a significant new life. Traumatic moments change people’s lives. They change people’s views of God, of themselves and of life. Rather than battling to resist those changes, reframing frees a person to grow through them. Abraham understood that timeless truth—although he obviously did not coin the term we use today to describe it.

After the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote poignantly in his book A Grief Observed
that grief painfully opens up our lives to fresh insights about our past and fresh hopes for the future. We mourn our loss, but grief also leads us to new vistas.

This book is designed to nudge these travelers in healthy directions, tested through the millennia by people of faith and undergirded by years of research into identifying and teaching these techniques to men and women. You will find cutting-edge scholarship referenced throughout this book—and a list of recommended readings from those scholars at the end of this book. You also will find helpful references from scripture. In these chapters, I suggest many techniques you can use, and I close each chapter with a prayer, inviting you to join me in these prayers. I welcome you to print them out and place them on your dinner table, fold them into a frequently read book or hang them in your home as a reminder.

Over time, you will find more resources at a website we will be building: http://www.GuideForGrief.info
As we launch the book, that URL initially takes readers to the main ReadTheSpirit online magazine, where our introductory stories are appearing. Eventually, a larger GuideForGrief website will publish online resources including a small-group study guide, plus suggestions of helpful organizations and websites. Although Americans fear death, congregational leaders will discover that organizing a small-group series around this book—or the formation of a grief-ministry support group that starts with a study of this book—will prove to be a potent outreach program in your community.

We welcome your ideas and questions at our website. I look forward to hearing from you online.

(Email us at [email protected] with questions or suggestions.)

Roger B. Murchison

How to order Guide for Grief

E-EDITIONS OF GUIDE FOR GRIEF: Soon, Guide for Grief will be available for all E-readers.

GUIDE FOR GRIEF: Visit Amazon to order your copy of Guide for Grief, Help in Surviving the Stages of Grief and Bereavement after a Loss.

GUIDE FOR GRIEF (Deluxe Color Edition): Soon, Guide for Grief also will be available in a full-color edition, featuring 10 inspirational, full-page paintings by Sara Pollock Searle designed to enrich readers’ reflections on overcoming grief.

Rodger Murchison’s speaking schedule

RODGER MURCHISON speaks widely about helping families survive grief, based on his decades of experience working with families and researching the latest findings on grief ministry. He has appeared on television and radio, has written for national magazines—and has lectured at universities and national conferences on ministry. He will return to lecture at Oxford University in 2012. While Rodger is comfortable in professional and academic settings, his welcoming approach to sharing helpful stories also make him popular with audiences of families looking for practical and inspirational ideas in coping with grief. He also has many years of experience in helping to develop grief-ministry workshops. To inquire about his speaking schedule, email us at [email protected]

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.

Good Grief! Let us help you with grief now … before …

September 23, 2011 by

DANSE MACABRE from the 13th-Century Church of St. Nicholas in Tallinn Estonia. These elaborate artworks spread through churches in Europe, reminding men and women to prepare for grief as a natural part of life. In one Danse Macabre scene, Death comes for an Emperor, captioned with the lines: “Emperor, your sword won’t help you out; Scepter and crown are worthless here; I’ve taken you by the hand; For you must come to my dance.” Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Why read about grief? Because we’re all going to die and, before that, we’re all going to grieve as others die around us. Most Americans hate to even think about aging—let alone dying—so we have become a dramatically aging nation poorly prepared for the losses ahead of us.

We can help! For two years, ReadTheSpirit has been working with Georgia-based pastor Rodger Murchison to produce our new Guide for Grief: Help in Surviving the Stages of Grief and Bereavement after a Loss. Not only has Rodger specialized in working with grieving families and grief-ministry workshops for many years, but he earned his doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary specializing in ministry with grieving families. His research into grief counseling spans work in both American and British universities, including the resources of Oxford University. This week, we are publishing this long-awaited book and we encourage you to order a copy by simply clicking on the book’s cover at right.

Introducing
Rodger Murchison’s
“Guide for Grief:
Help in surviving
the stages of grief
and bereavement
after a loss,” Part 1

PART 1, today, is ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm’s introduction
PART 2, Meet Rodger Murchison in a personal introduction from the author.
PART 3, coming soon, is our author interview with Rodger Murchison on his new Guide for Grief.

Everyone dies.
Every family grieves.
There is no other pastoral challenge as universal as death. This truth is so simple and powerful that medieval churches often displayed vivid images of Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death. In stained glass windows, tapestries or murals, a skeletal or sometimes a dark-robed grim reaper moved through the world calling everyone of every age and social status.

Today, no American church architect would propose decorating with Danse Macabre. Americans are terrified of admitting that we are aging, let alone dying. Before I became Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine and books, I was a journalist who specialized in reporting on religious issues for newspapers. One year, I worked with a team of investigative reporters studying every family who visited Dr. Jack Kevorkian for assistance in suicide. We found that some families were so terrified of death that a mere diagnosis of a scary disorder drove a loved one to suicide. The greater tragedy we uncovered in our reporting is that, in some instances, the dead man or woman was misdiagnosed and had years to live. They rushed to end their lives out of the sheer terror of contemplating a slower death. What happened after these deaths? None of the Kevorkian families were convicted of a crime, of course, but their reactions to these deaths were so intense that many families found themselves locked in a prison of grief. Yes, Kevorkian and his clients do represent an extreme response to death and grief. But they also illustrate the depth of the American anxiety concerning all things having to do with death.

In his new Guide for Grief, the Rev. Rodger Murchison describes how easily all families—ordinary families like yours and mine—can fall into negative patterns of grief. Of course, grief is not only natural, it is essential. Grief is both a painful and a healthy part of life.

“Grief is the price we pay for love,” Queen Elizabeth II told the world after the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. Right now, one in three American households includes a person who is a full-time caregiver for someone with a chronic and, in many cases, a life-threatening condition. The American population is aging at a relentless rate as Baby Boomers finally confront their own mortality. All of us who love will grieve—and our grief may run far longer than many of our friends will understand. We all need help in exploring the universal journey of grief.

This guide takes a Christian approach to death and grieving. That’s the religious affiliation voiced by 4 out of 5 Americans, according to research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Families who are not Christian also will benefit from these basic, well-tested principles, which Rodger Murchison has gleaned from ancient traditions as well as the latest scholarly research into coping with grief.

How to order Guide for Grief

E-EDITIONS OF GUIDE FOR GRIEF: Soon, Guide for Grief will be available for all E-readers.

GUIDE FOR GRIEF: Visit Amazon to order your copy of Guide for Grief, Help in Surviving the Stages of Grief and Bereavement after a Loss.

GUIDE FOR GRIEF (Deluxe Color Edition): Soon, Guide for Grief also will be available in a full-color edition, featuring 10 inspirational, full-page paintings by Sara Pollock Searle designed to enrich readers’ reflections on overcoming grief.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.

We asked & you responded to Brian McLaren, Part 3

June 16, 2011 by

HERE are our final four voices!

Part 1 First 4 of our 12 responses

Part 2 Respones 5 to 8

Interview McLaren & Richard Rohr

AT ReadTheSpirit, we’re seeing fascinating patterns and connections among all 12 reader responses this week. Can you see the connections in these responses? Think about asking your small group to consider these voices along with you.

 

SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE:
REMEMBERING

Remembering. I’d say the biggest spiritual challenge for me is remembering who I am and whose I am. Mother, wife, pastor, daughter-in-law, sister, American, Presbyterian, White, Privileged, Preacher, Teacher—and one of God’s creations. So often I am attempting to fulfill my perceptions of what is expected of me in those various roles that I forget who I am. Not often enough, I remember that I was God-created and loved. Then I drift off into working out my divine purpose and forget who I am again.

Remembering. I rarely remember to “be here now.” So often I am planning ahead about what I still need to get done and even as I do that, I’m already guilting myself about what I’ve left undone, who I’ve disappointed, and what other signpost I have erected on my road paved with good intentions leading to hell. That’s about the time when I think about how “I should pray” more often or more regularly and then to escape myself, I’ll find something to read.

Remembering. Mostly, I need to remember how to pray. Sometimes it feels like every breath is a prayer to get through the day, or not often enough, there’s a sharp intake of breath as I see God—in nature or in others.

By the Rev. Diane Hoppe Hugo of Mid-Coast Presbyterian Church in Maine. She writes: “In addition to being Pastor, I am Mom to 14-year-old Tad and 10-year-old Maggie.”

SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE: HOLDING FAITH IN EACH COMPLEX MOMENT

The biggest spiritual challenge for me is remembering it is not all about me, while remembering, indeed, that I am a child of God. How do I hold these two? It is quite easy for me to forget one or the other from moment to moment. Without both, however, I am unbalanced and lost.

I can do nothing on my own. I do not even know how I am able to know anything, to breathe, to think, to act. I just do these things without effort, most of the time. My consciousness comprehends so little.

At the same time, I must try to do what I can, to the best that I can. Each of us will die one day. And yet, I feel the need to work to become better, to help others, to learn. Why? I don’t know. But I am so grateful for that need and for the beauty, the anguish, the complexity, the fact of our collective existence on earth.

In all, the biggest spiritual challenge for me is to remember God within each moment, no matter how ridiculous or glorious the situation.

Robin Anderson “just completed the M.Div. degree at the Earlham School of Religion.  A lifelong Quaker, she lives (and swelters) in Austin, Texas.”

SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE: PRAY WITHOUT CEASING

Oh, if I could pray without ceasing,
If I could stay in an attitude of connection with Creator always,
Then I would be a continual blessing to others,
And be set free to Love, Trust, and wait.

Cindy Moorhouse Fischer of Coronado, California, describes herself this way: “After teaching Sunday school and youth groups for decades, sage-burning, contemplative, dancing-yogini with 4 sons who are filmmakers, musicians, and even a cosmetologist is spreading her wings and learning to be a fitness trainer, biofeedback student, and maybe a yoga-for-everybody instructor. Oh, I play the flute and love my Bunny (who is a rabbit.).”

SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE: ‘CHALLENGE’ OVERLOAD!

What’s the biggest spiritual challenge in my daily life? To have no challenges! Years ago, I began to consider the publishing industry, and while many a book offers sane counsel and good advice, and sometimes even the gospel, most of what pass as  “best sellers” are premised on meeting artificially identified “challenges.”

I am not critiquing McClaren’s latest book, but I am responding to the question. In a nutshell, I have come to realize, with a calm and certain assurance, that Jesus has fixed the Father’s love on my life, and there’s nothing that can break that bond of love, in this life, or in the life to come.

With that said, I enjoy daily life and bear the burdens of the day with equal acceptance, neither condemning myself for burdens, nor congratulating myself for the joys, with no deficit-assessments of current spiritual practices and life.

Life is life is life, with all the poetry of Ecclesiastes’ “there is a time….” Much like a rollercoaster, the highs and lows are the same ride—and one can only ride all of it to reach the end.

Prayer, reading, contemplation, writing, loving and laughing, fretting about my son in Africa or enjoying a slice of pizza with my spouse—it’s all part and parcel of the reality of life, and like most human beings, if not all, I’m doing the best I can in any given moment, relying upon the grace that chose me, and chooses me again and again.

Life is such that I see and hear each day, read Scripture and sing hymns—all of this drifting around in my spirit, under the careful, and mostly anonymous hand of God. The challenge, then, is to avoid the culturally induced “challenges” that might otherwise send me out frantically buying the latest device or book to help me meet the latest “need.”

Tom Eggebeen of California was the subject of the single most widely read story that appeared in ReadTheSpirit in 2010.

CHECK OUT our in-depth interview with both Brian McLaren and Franciscan spiritual teacher Richard Rohr about the spiritual challenges—and gifts—of aging.

Please connect with us and help us to reach a wider audience

Conversation is far better than the dangerous shouting matches we’ve been witnessing in our global culture. So, please, email us at [email protected] and tell us what you think of our stories—and, please tell a friend to start reading along with you!

We welcome your Emails! . We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed. Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.

Interview with Richard Rohr & Brian McLaren on aging

June 14, 2011 by

FRANCISCAN RICHARD ROHR & EVANGELICAL BRIAN MCLAREN
TACKLE THE TRUTH WE ALL DREAD—AND WE ALL FACE: AGING

Considering Richard Rohr’s global influence as a spiritual teacher, many readers may be surprised that this 68-year-old Franciscan friar lives in a little cottage in Albuquerque, not far from his Center for Action and Contemplation. In two years, when he’s 70, he plans to withdraw even further from the world—ending his restless travel schedule as a part of his carefully planned retirement.

We’re used to in-your-face spiritual teachers like Joel Osteen and Deepak Chopra, who revel in the spotlight and the flood of resources that come from their best-selling careers. Rohr is teaching us something quite different—a spiritual model for living that’s more attuned to our ordinary lives.

Rohr is not alone! America is getting older—in ever-more-modest circumstances, sociologists tell us. The brightest of our spiritual sages, at last, are turning to the dreaded question of aging. They’re telling us that all of life—the whole aging process—includes spiritual gifts at every stage. In fact, this summer, Richard Rohr’s longtime friend Brian McLaren writes about the stages of life’s journey represented by the “12 Words” in his new book, which our readers are writing about this week. Rohr is writing about the stages as “2 Halves of Life.” The two writers are longtime friends.

So, in an unusual author interview today, we’re welcoming both Brian McLaren and Richard Rohr to talk with us about Richard’s new book. (Here’s a link to our original interview with Brian if you’d like to compare insights.)

HIGHLIGHTS OF INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN MCLAREN & RICHARD ROHR
ON ROHR’S ‘FALLING UPWARD: SPIRITUALITY FOR 2 HALVES OF LIFE’

RICHARD ROHRDAVID: We are going to publish an unusual interview with both of you guys—assembling the final text from our two individual telephone interviews. I’m going to give Brian an opportunity to pose some questions to you, Richard, and here’s the first one …

Richard, you write about moving from “simplicity” to “complexity” and back again to a “second simplicity”—or we might call it harmony or awe—in life’s last stage. You argue that, if we’re willing to accept this spiritual gift, we can discover it right there as a natural part of the aging process. In your words from the book, Richard: “We need to hold together all the stages of life including the necessary complexities, and for some strange wonderful reason, it all becomes quite simple as we approach our later years.”

In Brian’s book, he writes about his own early years and then he adds: “Now, almost four decades later, I cringe when I hear the teachings that were standard fare back then. I have discarded those theological wineskins, but I treasure more than ever the wine of the Spirit that was somehow conveyed to me through them. That suit of theological clothing doesn’t fit me anymore but the naked spirituality that sustains me today originally came to me dressed in it.”

It feels to me, as a reader, as though you two are writing the same story—as your two lives appear to converge.

RICHARD: I consider Brian a dear brother. Think of how he comes from an evangelical background and I come from a Franciscan Catholic background—so this truly is an example of the emerging Christianity. Yes, we’re on the same page—sharing many of the same details! It’s amazing!

DAVID: We often tell readers that ReadTheSpirit is engaged in bringing a “national conversation” to the public. I’d say that right now you two are converging within that larger conversation about where we’re all headed.

RICHARD: That sure makes sense. There clearly is an evolution of consciousness taking place. We’re moving beyond tribal thinking. The tribal frame doesn’t work for a large percentage of us anymore. Much of the last 2000 years was lived inside that frame whether we were Protestant or Catholic or Jewish—or whatever religious frame we might have felt around us. I don’t think it’s because people are especially angry or rebellious or iconoclastic now. But, there’s a different feel now to the ways we can talk with each other.

DAVID: I agree completely. And in this new freedom to talk honestly, we can tackle the really enormous issues we’re all facing—like the spiritual meaning of getting older. That’s the truth of American culture right now, although people dread even thinking about it. Independently of each other, you two have come up with two different metaphors.

BRIAN McLARENBRIAN: Richard is writing about this idea of spirituality representing two halves of life, which is his way of expressing this. I came up with my own four stages that I’m describing, related to my 12 words. Richard and I are good friends and I know we’re laughing about this, because we’re talking about something so similar. I could argue that the first two of my four stages are what he calls the first half of life—and my second two stages are his second half of life.

RICHARD: I want to go reread exactly how Brian describes the 12 words and four stages, but from what I recall as we’re talking—yes, I do think his stages overlap with what I’m teaching. However we name them, these ideas can be found in many religious traditions.

When I was teaching in India some years ago, I was taken to see a church in Bangalore where there were four unusual stained-glass windows. They weren’t your standard Catholic stained-glass windows; these four showed stages of life that go back a long way in Indian culture: the student, the householder and then— Well, at that point, most Americans assume that’s all there is to life. In our culture, we think that the meaning of life is to get married, set up a household, then hold it all together and wait for the grandchildren to arrive. But in this church, there were windows showing a third and fourth stage of life beyond the householder. The third window showed the forest dweller—the mature person who, in what I would call the second half of life, goes beyond the home base of the dominant culture. Then, there was a fourth window—an image of the sage or wise person.

I would say that both Brian and I—and these images I’m describing from the windows I recall in India—are all overlapping in describing a spiritual trajectory for life. It really doesn’t matter whether we count these stages as 2 or 4 or 6 or 12—the truth comes through.

A JOURNEY FAR GREATER THAN 10 KEYS TO SUCCESS

DAVID: There’s something else that’s amazing—and rather daring, I think—in what you two are saying about aging. You’re both writing about life’s goal as being both larger—and smaller—than the typical 10 Keys to Success we keep finding in get-rich bestsellers. You’re writing about living a good life, but your vision of goodness isn’t defined by wealth or even by power. You’re describing a good life as a natural journey from our first big hopes for adulthood to final years of relatively quiet satisfaction and growing spiritual wisdom. I’ll bet that neither of you could have written these books earlier in your careers.

BRIAN: Yes, absolutely. I started grappling with these things when, as a pastor, I was trying to understand what people in my congregation were going through. In historic churches, there is a catechesis process that we put people through but usually that ends at the beginning of adulthood. The irony is that we don’t have much of a spiritual formation framework for adults in most churches. We don’t help people to see the much larger, longer sweep of our spiritual journey.

As a pastor I realized that this was an aching void. You would think that for a religion 2000 years old, there would be a lot more common knowledge about spiritual formation across an entire life and it’s surprising how little is common knowledge. We actually do have resources in our tradition but we need to bring them back to the surface. That’s what Richard and I and many others are trying to do. We’re trying to provide some framework for a birth-to-death process of spiritual formation.

RICHARD: Brian says that so well—so clearly. There isn’t a word Brian said there that I would disagree with. It’s true for Catholics, too. All that money Catholics contribute to grade-school education seems to give people permission to solidify and ossify at that level of thinking. Too many people assume that we’ve reached a mature Christianity just because we have memorized all the catechism answers. We have a lot of adult Catholics today who have remained right there at very immature levels of transformation just repeating phrases they learned as children. It’s rather sad, but many of these people assume that a grade-school-level of understanding is the nature of faith throughout an entire life.

Now, before Catholics complain about what I’m saying, let me be clear: Just like Brian in his response, I’m picking on Catholics here because that’s my tradition. I’ve been a priest for more than 40 years and I know how much wisdom we have in our tradition. We must help people to rediscover that. We can’t keep stopping at immature levels of education and missing the entire arc of life.

FROM DRESS FOR SUCCESS TO SHOPPING AT ST. VINCENT DE PAUL

DAVID: I want to return to what Richard just described as the “forest dweller” and what the Buddhist writer Geri Larkin calls the “ox-herding practice”—the deliberate decision to down-scale as we age. We’re not talking here about that painful downsizing when we reach the frail stage at the very end and we’re forced to cut back and move into a health-care facility. No, we’re talking about something more radical and intentional—deciding to move off center stage, live more simply and allow other people to shine in all of their active, mid-life glory. Every year or so, we’re privileged to have Geri Larkin appear somewhere in the pages of ReadTheSpirit. I know you two haven’t read her books, but I’d say that her writing, in particular, underlines that this spiritual wisdom is broader than Christianity.

BRIAN: When we talk about ox herding, or whatever you want to call that kind of approach to later life, we’re talking about something so very different from the image we usually celebrate of people addicted to our own importance. Most people can’t bear to go from prominence to obscurity.

But I think that is part of a natural aging process. I feel this already. I am now more concerned about my kids’ success than my own success. This is something Richard is talking and writing about: the nature of this elder stage, where you have something to offer but you don’t need to go out there and market it in the way people feel they need to do when young. I think of someone like Walter Brueggemann. Anyone who has ever tried to get Walter to speak at some event knows that it’s like you need a crowbar to physically pry him out of his silence. He’s so much the opposite of people who feel they can’t possibly step off center stage.

I’d like to hear Richard share some of the things he’s thinking about in this regard. It’s so interesting that he is at a very similar moment in his work.

RICHARD: First, we need to say that this approach is there in our Christian tradition—if we pay attention to it and bring it back to the surface for people. I see this happening when Jesus approaches James and John, Peter and Andrew. The text makes it clear these guys are adult men with an occupation, with links to family and the work they do in the community. They are householders and Jesus is clearly leading them beyond that. He’s not calling them to join a church down on the corner. He’s leading them to a new phase of life with no clear description or definition. Talk about an open horizon! Why would they leave their family and occupation? In a subsistence economy like that 2000 years ago, their decision seems almost unbelievable. Yet, they responded and left behind business as usual.

I turn 70 in two years, in March 2013, and both the Franciscans and the Center know that I’m going to stop all the traveling I’ve been doing. Thank you for telling me about Geri’s story, because it gives me courage to know about more people who have done this. I am planning now for that demarcation in my own life. Now, I’d be foolish to say that something won’t come up where I absolutely have to travel somewhere later in life, but I’m describing my plan, my hope and desire.

DAVID: I don’t want to spoil your books for readers, but there’s a convergence even toward the end of your books. Brian writes about a 12th word: silence. And, in chapter 26 of Brian’s book, he quotes you, Richard, about silence: “Silence is the language of God, and the only language deep enough to absorb all the contradictions and failures that we are holding against ourselves. God loves us silently because God has no case to make against us. The silent communion absorbs our self-hatred, as every lover knows.”

RICHARD: Silence. Wow. We can talk forever on that, but it’s a good question to raise here. Silence is the only thing big enough, deep enough and wide enough to move us beyond argumentative dualism. True silence is an inner experience, not primarily an outer experience. You come to that inner silence and you can hold a lot more contradictions and conflicts. But silence is absolutely frightening to us. Most people have no training in silence whatsoever and that’s a disaster if we hope to be healers and peacemakers. You can’t get to the level of peacemaking where reconciling and healing takes place if we stay in the world of words. Words are dualistic. They distinguish this form and that form. That’s why education based on words is not the same as transformation. You and I both know people who hold doctorates and are stuck back in first-half-of-life thinking. But at the highest level of all the world’s religion, in the end we do find a healing silence.

Care to read more on Richard Rohr?

Visit Rohr’s home website: His Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was founded in the 1980s and deliberately places the word “Action” in front of the word “Contemplation.” That’s a key to Rohr’s life-long approach to spiritual teaching.

Get the new book: You can order Richard Rohr’s new Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life from Amazon now.

Want more on Brian McLaren?

OTHER BRIAN McLAREN BOOKS and INTERVIEWS are described in our Brian McLaren Small Group Resources page..

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering spirituality, religion, interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

Richard Rohr explores the spiritual gifts of aging

June 12, 2011 by

IN ‘FALLING UPWARD: SPIRITUALITY FOR THE 2 HALVES OF LIFE’
FRANCISCAN RICHARD ROHR UPENDS OUR DREAD OF AGING

The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr ranks high on many people’s lists of “living saints” because of his courageous and creative spiritual teaching. In two dozen books and decades of classes and retreats, Rohr has tackled the truly big challenges of daily life: finding hope in the midst of tragedy, struggling against injustice and learning forms of prayer that can renew our lives even in the midst of darkness. Now, in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he tackles the most dreaded challenge we all face: finding the spiritual treasures of aging.

Interestingly enough, Rohr doesn’t describe “Falling Upward” that way himself. In our Wednesday interview with Rohr, you’ll hear him describe this new book as a holistic overview of the potential spiritual stages throughout a truly good and satisfying life. In these pages, he describes the simplicity of youth, moving through the complexity of mid-life and—if we open ourselves to the best stirrings of the spirit—then there’s the satisfying simplicity of wisdom that comes with older age.

In recommending his book, we prefer to highlight this second half of his new book, because there are so few resources available that help us think about aging as a spiritual gift. We dread getting older in America and, in popular books and films, we treat aging like a disease we must cure—or, at worst, a pitiful disorder we must avoid at all costs.

What a pleasure to discover Rohr’s guiding voice, leading us as a master of spiritual disciplines, to see within aging—not a dreaded monster, but an actual spiritual goal in living. A goal, that is, if we can accept this confident, compassionate wisdom that no longer needs to settle all questions—and no longer needs to sort the world into neat groups of friends and foes. That awareness can come with age, if we understand the power of that spiritual gift, he writes.

Good thing, too! Because, as you’ll learn in our Wednesday interview, Rohr is close to a retirement that he has carefully been planning—so he is betting his own life on this wisdom. On Wednesday, don’t miss our interview with this contemporary sage. Today, we’re quoting a few lines from his new book, “Falling Upward,” to give you a better feel for what he’s teaching now.

RICHARD ROHR ON MOVING FROM
LIFE’S FIRST SIMPLICITY THROUGH MID-LIFE COMPLEXITY:

Using his own life as an example in Chapter 9, he writes: I began as a very conservative pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, living in innocent Kansas, pious and law abiding, buffered and bounded by my parents’ stable marriage and many lovely liturgical traditions that sanctified my time and space. That was my first wonderful simplicity. I was a very happy child and young man, and all who knew me then would agree.

Yet I grew in my experience, and was gradually educated in a much larger world of the 1960s and 1970s, with degrees in philosophy and theology, and a broad liberal arts education given me by the Franciscans. That education was a second journey into rational complexity. I left the garden, just as Adam and Eve had to do, even though my new Scripture awareness made it obvious that Adam and Eve were probably not historical figures, but important archetypal symbols. Darn it! My parents back in Kansas were worried! I was heady with knowledge and “enlightenment” and was surely not in Kansas anymore. I had passed, like Dorothy, “over the rainbow.” It is sad and disconcerting for a while, outside the garden, and some lovely innocence dies, yet “angels with flaming swords prevented my return” to the first garden (Genesis 3:24). There was no going back, unfortunately. Life was much easier on the childhood side of the rainbow.

As time passed, I became simultaneously very traditional and very progressive, and I have probably continued to be so to this day. I found a much larger and even happier garden (note the new garden described at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21!). I totally believe in Adam and Eve now, but on about 10 more levels. (Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.) I have lived much of my subsequent life like a man without a country—and yet a man who could go to any country and be at home. This nowhere land surprised even me. I no longer fit in with either the mere liberals or the mere conservatives. This was my first strong introduction to paradox, and it took most of midlife to figure out what had happened—and how—and why it had to happen. The “pilgrim’s progress” was, for me, sequential, natural, and organic as the circles widened.

RICHARD ROHR ON DISCOVERING
THE SECOND SIMPLICITY POSSIBLE IN LIFE’S SECOND HALF:

In the first half of life, most men and women learn hard realities—the complexities—that can knock us to our knees. Many remain stooped and stressed in those struggles for the rest of their lives. But the world’s great religious traditons teach that a second half of life is possible in which we fall upward. We rely on our faith and growing awareness of the world to humble us and teach us to appreciate the precious mysteries of life. Where does falling upwards carry us?

Rohr writes: In the second half of life, we can give our energy to making even the painful parts and the formally excluded parts belong to the now unified field—especially people who are different, and those who have never had a chance. If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else. If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment and futility to others. This is the tragic path of the many elderly people who have not become actual elders, probably because they were never eldered or mentored themselves.

Such people seem to have missed out on the joy and clarity of the first simplicity, perhaps avoided the interim complexity, and finally lost the great freedom and magnanimity of the second simplicity as well. We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite “simple” as we approach our later years.

In fact, if this book is not making it very simple for you, I am doing it wrong and you are hearing it wrong. The great irony is that you must go through a necessary complexity (perhaps another word for necessary suffering) to return to any second simplicity. There is no nonstop flight from first to second naiveté.

Care to read more on Richard Rohr?

Visit Rohr’s home website: His Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was founded in the 1980s and deliberately places the word “Action” in front of the word “Contemplation.” That’s a key to Rohr’s life-long approach to spiritual teaching.

Get the new book: You can order Richard Rohr’s new Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life from Amazon now.

Please connect with us and help us to reach a wider audience

Conversation is far better than the dangerous shouting matches we’ve been witnessing in our global culture. So, please, email us at [email protected] and tell us what you think of our stories—and, please tell a friend to start reading along with you!

We welcome your Emails! . We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed. Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.

 

Spiritual Puzzles of Jack Kevorkian 1928-2011

June 3, 2011 by

Jack Kevorian’s Spiritual Legacy:
A Painful Tattoo, Bones in the Pocket & the Mystery of Death

JACK KEVORKIAN earlier this year. Photographer Gevorg Gevorgyan http://ggprophoto.comJack Kevorkian finally knows the answer to his life’s biggest question: “I’ve been fascinated by death because I wondered what the unknown was that’s facing me,” Kevorkian testified in a 1994 hearing. “Also, I’m a medical doctor, death is a part of my profession, and we don’t know anything about it. … If you know what death is, you know what life is.”

Unfortunately, none of us who so closely covered his long career in assisted suicide—eventually claiming well over 100 deaths—can interview Jack now.

But, one thing is clear. Attempts to paint the Kevorkian story as a contest between an angry skeptic and his religious enemies are way off the mark. As a journalist who reported on spiritual responses to Kevorkian over many years, I was responsible for recording many of those religious blasts in the public square. Over the years, the loudest religious response was voiced—and was well financed—by Detroit’s Catholic Cardinal Adam Maida, who eventually retired in 2009. In the 1990s, Maida organized a statewide campaign in Michigan and an entire interfaith coalition of religious leaders to condemn Kevorkian and assisted suicide. For his part, Kevorkian usually responded to religious leaders with acid-tipped barbs.

In one news report about Maida’s decision to fund a multi-media campaign against Kevorkian, I quoted Maida as saying that assisted suicide was a slippery slope toward euthanasia and abusive engineering of human life. “We could have people making decisions for us about who can come into life and how we go out of it,” Maida said in our interview.

When I asked Kevorkian about this, he snapped back: “Maida is about as relevant to this issue as he is to a heart operation.”

Maida responded that Kevorkian was wrong. This question is part of a global concern for defending the sanctity of human rights against powerful forces that the 20th Century proved were fully capable of large-scale human-rights abuses. “This is rooted in our understanding of who we are as human beings,” Maida told me. “In abortion and in assisted suicide, we’ve got basic human rights we’re trying to address.”

But that’s not the only spiritual frame through which the Kevorkian debate was viewed by American families. To this day, millions of men and women simply have no idea where to turn for spiritual advice on difficult end-of-life decisions. As a careful observer of religious media, I can tell you: Even as Americans collectively age and face these decisions in growing numbers—there’s a yawning lack of responsible religious counseling on these issues affecting millions.

Kevorkian and the Woman Who Carried Bones in Her Pocket

What haunts me in remembering Kevorkian are the men and women I met who, like Kevorkian, were honest about the mystery of the Big Unknown—who desperately and sometimes poignantly searched for spiritual as well as physical answers.

Let’s be honest: For all his bluster, Kevorkian cared little about the spiritual side of life. When he talked about such matters, he was blunt as a sledgehammer and often went out of his way to offend traditionally religious people.

I was part of the Detroit Free Press’ long-term investigative team that studied scores of cases in which Kevorkian helped people kill themselves. Our team discovered that a shocking portion of the people Kevorkian helped to kill were, in fact, not terminally ill. They might have had years of life left, despite their conditions. And, in some extreme cases, our team found, people were so terrified and depressed about their possible medical conditions that they ended their lives—only to have an autopsy prove that they weren’t physically ill at all! Despite his claims of elaborate ethical codes, Kevorkian managed death like an assembly-line foreman—often paying little attention to people’s physical and mental conditions and sometimes leaving their remains in ghastly settings.

That’s what led so many of the surviving families, who returned home after Kevorkian suicides, to invent their own spiritual responses. That’s what led to the woman with the painful tattoo—and the woman who carried bones in her pocket.

If you care to research Kevorkian’s career, you’ll find the full names of these unfortunate people, but in this story I’ll use only first names.

In 1996, Rebecca was a California woman who killed herself with Kevorkian’s help because she believed that “excruciating” multiple sclerosis already had destroyed her quality of life. However, her autopsy later showed that, while she may have been psychologically disturbed, she was “robust,” “fairly healthy” and had no signs of MS.

Through this traumatic process, Rebecca’s daughter Christy—who had assisted her Mom in reaching Jack—suffered an agonizing spiritual struggle before settling upon her own private memorial to her mother.

Way back in the good years with her mother, Rebecca and Christy had enjoyed the ocean. So, Christy decided to have a huge tattoo of the ocean floor permanently etched into her back. “There’s a starfish and a sand dollar and there’s a big seahorse with bubbles coming out of its mouth. It’s really colorful and shows everything my mom would love,” Christy told me.

Part of establishing this memorial in skin were the hours Christy forced herself to lay still as tiny needles pressed the dyes into her skin. The pain became a penitential rite. In fact, she couldn’t complete it as soon as she had hoped, Christy told me—the pain was too intense. Eventually, Christy planned to keep returning to the artist until the ocean scene was finished with the words, “In Loving Memory: Rebecca.”

What else could Christy have done at that point? We all may have responses to her dilemma. We may scoff at anyone naïve enough to deal with the infamous “Dr. Death.” But Rebecca and Christy were women many of us might have befriended—real, loving, intelligent women simply seeking solace.

They were women like—well, like the woman with bones in her pocket. Carol is her name, the devoted mother of an ALS-suffering son who couldn’t bear to see him go through the final phases of the debilitating disorder. Her son was only 27, bedridden, unable to speak clearly or to use his fingers by the time she helped him end his life with Kevorkian’s aid. At that point, she and her son were desperate. On his own, the son had made three unsuccessful attempts at ending his life.

And yet, Carol told me, they weren’t aware of any supportive spiritual community to help them through this crisis. Many of the families who visited Kevorkian described this painful void. Suddenly, professionals were telling them that the end of life was largely a matter of managing financial crises and organizing medical services. One surviving family told me about the unbearable rudeness of technicians who came to pick up their just-deceased mother’s hospital bed. In contrast to this uncaring vacuum, even the brusque Kevorkian could seem like a savior.

Of course, Kevorkian dispensed just death—and left the surviving families in a flash. There was no ongoing care. Despite that lack of personal care, Carol remained a Kevorkian advocate after her son’s death. She told me that it was simply left to her—alone—to establish her own mourning rituals. “I just can’t get over it,” she said.

On the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Carol’s son, several relatives did decide to carry out his wishes by sprinkling his ashes from a mountaintop. But Carol was not ready to give up all of the ashes and, instead, took a small spoon and measured out 23 scoops of the ashes for the mountaintop rite.

Why 23? “Because (he) was No. 23 in Dr. Kevorkian’s series,” Carol explained.

As she examined the ashes, she discovered small bone fragments, some of them white and some of them charred black. “Now, I carry around two bone chips with me, one black and one white,” she said. “I just keep them in my pocket. This way, any time I put my hand in my pocket, there’s my son. It’s pathetic, but when it’s your son, you just don’t get over it.”

Carol was right. We don’t get over death easily—and certainly not such a traumatic death. For all of our global spiritual awareness, our collective richness of religious wisdom and our millennia-long experience with ritual and reassurance—there’s precious little being offered to such needy families today.

If you’re reading this today—and you’re involved in thoughtful ministries to aid families—then email us at [email protected] and tell us about what you’re doing and what you think about all of this. Certainly there are growing numbers of hospice programs, thousands of clergy and chaplains who do a solid job with end-of-life rituals—and many professionals researching these issues.

But as Jack Kevorkian finally gets the answer to his life’s biggest question today—June 3, 2011—perhaps it’s a moment when all of us can resolve to help our friends, our neighbors and our own families find out more about what unfolds as our lives near their conclusions.

Let’s work on it now, shall we? That is, while we’re still here to talk about it in a helpful way. We certainly can’t ask Jack what he found on the other side.

Care to read more about Kevorkian’s legacy?

You can still order a copy of The Suicide Machine by the Detroit Free Press Staff via Amazon. I wrote the chapter in that book about the spiritual and psychological legacy of Kevorkian suicides for many families.

Please connect with us and help us to reach a wider audience

Conversation is far better than the dangerous shouting matches we’ve been witnessing in our global culture. So, please, email us at [email protected] and tell us what you think of our stories—and, please tell a friend to start reading along with you!

We welcome your Emails! . We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed. Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.

 

A Mother’s Day story you must read, then tell a friend

May 5, 2011 by

PATRICIA CHARGOT, right, with her mother ZENIATODAY, we are pleased to celebrate Mother’s Day with this story by journalist Patricia Chargot. A long-time Detroit Free Press staff writer, Chargot has specialized in recent years in reporting news for young readers. She has circled the globe several times in her quest for stories. And, as so often happens in writers’ lives, one of her best stories was right there—so close to home.
Thank you Pat for this story!
Read it.
Then, share it with a friend.

A Box of DOTS,
a Bouquet of Zinnias,
a Remembrance of My Mother

By Patricia Chargot

Where is she? I look at my mother’s portrait and that’s what I ask myself: How can a face so familiar and dear no longer exist in this world?

Our eyes lock—mine on hers in a photo taken on her 80th birthday—and for an instant I might as well be a newly hatched gosling or a newborn gorilla in one of those behavioral studies, imprinting her mother’s sight, sound and smell.

How I wish I could be with her now, watching “Sex in the City” reruns and eating DOTS, her favorite candy, in her tiny assisted-care apartment. I spent one night a week there for seven years as she wound down like the Energizer Bunny on bad batteries. There will be no reruns of that.

“Be with me always.”

That’s what she said to me as she lay dying 18 months ago at age 84—whispered it with her eyes closed and barely able to speak. Such a pretty little sentence! It sounded quaintly old-fashioned, like an expression of love in a Victorian valentine. It’s what I whisper now when I gaze at her picture, gladdened by my undimmed response to those sparkling blue eyes, that warm, radiant smile.

“Be with me always, Mom.” I hope she will be, that I will somehow get to see her again, that at the very least, love proves to be indestructible and permeates everything, like neutrinos.

This piece is for my mother on Mother’s Day, a belated valentine of sorts, but also a spiritual sounding of the living link that I—and so many others—feel to the mothers we’ve lost.

A mother is what Mom was. She didn’t have a brilliant career—though she could have; she didn’t work outside the home—or not for long. But she was special, as simply charming as a zinnia, the flower after which she claimed she was named. (She lied!) Zenia, nickname Zennie (ZEE-nee). Maiden name: Panfil. Married names: Chargot, then after my father died and she remarried, Lowe.

Zennie—even I sometimes called her that; we were girlfriends, after all—was elegant and beautiful with none of the arrogance or self-absorption that elegance and beauty so often confer. I really liked that about her. She was a privileged white suburbanite, the daughter of a Detroit high school principal, who graduated from college in an era when only about four percent of all U.S. women held a bachelor’s degree or higher. She was proud of her education, but she was no elitist.

You could park my mother anywhere and she’d strike up a conversation with anyone. I once left her on a bench outside a hospital while I went to get the car, and when I came back she was chatting up a young African-American woman who was poorly dressed and a tad scruffy, asking about her family. I really liked that about my mother, too.

ZENIA as a young woman.I didn’t like her much while growing up, though. She was the police, hot on the trail of any child—she had four—who broke any of her many house rules: “Stay out of the living room,” “Straighten the rug,” “No bare feet or shoes in the house! Wear socks!” You couldn’t be out of sight for 10 minutes without her yelling, “What you are doing?”

But she enabled our creativity.  The source of hers was her love for us. She taught us how to see animals in clouds, lying on a beach blanket in the backyard crooning Perry Como and Doris Day songs. Que sera sera.

She made sure we had plenty of crayons and other art supplies, and even taped rolls of white shelving paper to our playroom walls so we could work big and draw murals. What a clever mother!

She never said “no” to a large project, however grandiose. One summer she let us stage a carnival, complete with a half-dozen games, including a pie-throwing contest. She even helped us figure out how to concoct a convincing strawberry pie filling—flour, water and red food coloring—and let me enlist my little boyfriend as the target.

Another summer, Mom let me set up a summer school under our oak tree and recruit neighborhood kids as students. And she was always good for a lemonade stand. The agreement was that we could do pretty much anything we liked as long as we cleaned everything up when we were done.

And she could really surprise you. Once I bit into a sandwich at school and fished out a torn scrap of paper with the message, “I love, you. Mom.” 

One Easter, I found my first bra under the chocolate eggs and jellybeans in my Easter basket. I was ecstatic! The next year, the Easter bunny left my first pair of nylons and a little garter belt.

Mom was our muse, our playful trickster, and a relentless taskmaster rolled into one. Then she did an about-face when her first child left for college: She granted me the great gift of my freedom.

The night before I left, I burst into tears in the family room—our former playroom—convinced that I wouldn’t make any friends. I begged Mom to come get me the following weekend.

“You’re not going to want to come home,” she said, laughing. “By this time next week, you’re going to have a new life and new friends.”

Two days later, I called to say that college was great and that I’d see her at Thanksgiving. After that, she never pried or hovered, unlike today’s helicopter moms. She let me become my own woman.

When I was 22, shortly before my father died of cancer, my mother had a massive “nervous breakdown”—they didn’t use the term clinical depression then. She was 47 and just entering menopause. She wouldn’t even wash. I had never seen my mother nude, but I held her in my arms and bathed and dressed her for Dad’s funeral home visitation, perhaps the single most sacramental act of my life.

ZENIA and her second husband ED.Our roles reversed and for years I kept an eye on her. When she was 51 and I was 26, I took her with me to an inner city wine store and introduced her to the co-owner. Later, she drove back and left her glove on a store counter—accidentally, she insisted. He returned it, and three months later, they eloped.

Even as she continued to suffer from depression, she encouraged me to take risks. When I was 35, I again burst into tears the night before I was to leave on a six-month solo trip to China.

“Patty Chargot,” she scoffed, “you were in this same room and said the very same thing the night before you left for college. You’ll have a great time in China.”

I did. I called her once a month—collect—and after that called her from wherever I was in the world. No one ever has been more unabashedly thrilled to see or hear from me.

My mother blossomed, too. In the late ’80s, she planned a trip to Europe—her first—with minimal help from a travel agent. In 2002, a year after my stepfather died and she had recovered from bypass surgery, I watched as she ditched her fears at the door on the day we moved her into assisted care. She walked in on my arm, smiling, and never looked back.

My brothers and I transformed her apartment. It was our grandiose project that summer, and when we were finished, it looked like a cross between an art gallery and a chapel. There were paintings and religious icons everywhere. We even hung a crystal chandelier.

Mom soon became dependent on her walker, making it more difficult for me to take her out to dinner. One day I realized I was dragging her down the hall, and felt totally ashamed of myself. After that, I made a concerted effort to match her pace. It was her last great gift to me: She helped me to slow down.

It was hard watching her fade mentally, yet there was still so much intact: her lovely spirit, her good cheer—and she always knew my name.

Regarding hers: I had long suspected the flower story to be a fabrication.  She had hinted as much, but I could never get the truth out of her. Finally one night, after I had plied her with a little wine, her lips loosened:

“I was named after a St. Zenobia, but promise you won’t tell anyone. It just sounds so strange.” (I promised, but I lied. Sorry, Mom.) 

I googled Zenobia and found her on a roster of Greek Orthodox saints, which was hard to figure because my grandparents were Polish-American Roman Catholics. Zenobia also is one of many old Greek daughter-of-Zeus names for girls. Zenia, daughter of God, beloved mother of Mark, Clem, Karen and Patricia!

She deteriorated like the Parthenon, but there was no fixing her. She spent six weeks fighting four infections in the hospital, in her room, back in the hospital, in rehab, and in the hospital again. I was there every day, but missed her passing, for which I am grateful. I don’t have an image of her corpse in my head. She’s alive and smiling, turning her face to me as I gently wake her to say that I have to leave for work but that I love her.  “I love you more,” she says. Always.

We adored her, our beautiful, vivacious mother. The photo that captures our affection best, I think, shows my two brothers carrying her through the house like a log, one holding her feet, the other her arms. All three are laughing uproariously.

We laid her to rest between her two husbands, both World War II vets—an Army second lieutenant and a Marine captain—each married to her for 25 years. Lucky guys.

You don’t get everything in life, but I really lucked out in the mother department. I got St. Zenia, and yes, I pray to her. I built a little altar with her picture, a candle, flowers and today, a Mother’s Day card. Why not?

Shortly after Mom moved into assisted care, I met Annie, the facility’s oldest resident. She’s dead now. She was 101 then and still making daily rounds of the place with her walker, visiting all eight ’hoods, each with 10 residents.

One day, she started telling me about her mother.  She talked on and on. Finally, I asked, “How long has she been gone, Annie?”

“Sixty years,” she said, adding: “You never stop missing your mother.”

We want our international conversation to continue

Conversation is far better than the dangerous shouting matches we’ve been witnessing in our global culture. So, please, email us at [email protected] and tell us what you think of our stories—and, please tell a friend to start reading along with you!

We welcome your Emails! . We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed. Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online journal covering religion and cultural diversity.