First a little background. In my work as a hospice chaplain, I am often with families who are trying to figure out why the patient is waiting. It occurred to me one day that the delay might be on the OTHER side. Maybe the Welcoming Committee isn’t assembled yet.

In this vision (or whatever I should call it), Lew is about thirty years old. He is standing at a workbench, deeply engaged in some kind of interesting work. A person comes to the door to his right and says “Lew, it’s time to come down to the gate. Your mother is about to come.” Lew looks over at the person and says “I’ll be there in a minute. I’m not quite ready yet.” He turns back to his work.

What delights me about this is not that Lew keeps me waiting but that he is standing and speaking – things he could not do in this life. He was so mentally disabled on this earth that we never knew what interested him. I like thinking about who works standing at a workbench -a watchmaker? A jeweler? Some other fine craftsman? I look forward to seeing what’s on that workbench that has him so enthralled.

I’m not in a hurry to get there – and Lew isn’t in any hurry for me to come – but I have one more thing to look forward to in Heaven.

I close my eyes and listen:

From my right nearby lapping on a metal canoe
From my left a different rhythm on a plastic hull
Beneath a third beat as the waves hit the pilings of the deck
Distant dripping, flowing, rushing,
A paddle beating, an oar dipping.
A quiet percussive solo with many instruments
I hear the river’s music.

I consider what pigments I will need to paint what I see:

Hooker’s green deep
Permanent green light
Cobalt Blue
Dioxizine Purple
Napals Yellow
Titanium White.
I see the river’s image.

Then  I notice the layers of the river:

Limestone bedrock and boulders
Underwater grasses and moss
The flow of the whole
The small surface waves
Tiny ripples on each wave segment
A few bubbles bopping along
Each wave with a snowy peak of brightest light
I see the river’s architecture.

I long to be part of that music – to truly SEE the beauty and sacredness of what IS.

I long to be anchored to the Bedrock like that water before me
Fluid, flexing around life’s boulders,
Full of change, full of life
Transparent, supportive, nourishing
Often quiet
Sometimes powerful

Cherry Winkle Moore
Laity Lodge
Artist Retreat, October, 2011

Shortly after I went to work at the hospice where I am a chaplain, I learned about “grief bursts” from the Bereavement Coordinator.  I hadn’t heard the definition but I was familiar with the experience.

After my son, Lew, died and after the numbness, there was a period a time of nearly continual fireworks.  Every few moments something reminded me of his death and of the loss of his sweet presence in my world.  After awhile the “bursts” of grief began to get further apart.  During the first year and a half, I was often – many times a day – stabbed by the pain of my grief.   Tears were always close.

It has been thirteen years since Lew died.  Grief bursts happen very seldom now.  I think of Lew often but now those thoughts most often prompt a smile and thoughts of gratitude that I had him at all.  The pain is there but it’s as good as it is going to get.

This week, however, I was surprised by a major grief burst and by what caused it: a weather report!  I was aware that Friday of this week was going to be the anniversary of this significant event in my life.  I thought I’d be fine.  I planned to take the afternoon off work; I had an eye doctor’s appointment and had decided to not go back to the office with my dilated eyes. I often plan something special for February 4th and September 11th – the day Lew died and the day he was born.  I thought the doctor’s appointment and a few hours would be enough to honor the day this year.  Then I heard two of my co-workers mention that snow was expected on Friday.  (WHAM!!  Grief Burst!)

The day Lew died is forever associated with snow in my mind.  On February 4, 1998 Kentucky experienced the Snow of the Century; eighteen inches fell from east to west shutting the state down.  It almost NEVER snows here in central Texas.  I often say “If I never see snow again, it will be too soon.”  Last year there was a tiny snow storm here; we didn’t expect to see that again for a long time and then today it happened again.

The week Lew died the entire state of Kentucky shut down.  The roads and airports were closed.  Only emergency transportation was allowed.  It seemed right to me that the state stopped.  It fit my mourning.

Today Texas took a break.  The doctor’s appointment was cancelled; the hospice office was closed.  I didn’t even leave the house.  I ended up having a special, productive, quiet day including reminders of Lew.

Maybe again life slowed down to honor the memory of my son.

At least it did for me.

In my last post I wrote about my struggle to find a personal spiritual practice and confessed that I have often felt that I have ADHD of the Spiritual Life.  I remind myself often that the real point of all this is to lead a life focused on the love of God and to share the love of Christ with others.  I’m certainly not suggesting that you do what I do but that you find ways to be faithful and intentional in your personal devotion to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

My pattern for morning prayer is easy to remember because its sections spell ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.

When I first wake up, I sing (silently) “Father, I adore you”.

Father, I adore you.
Lay my life before you.
How I love you.

Jesus, I adore you.
Lay my life before you.
How I love you.

Spirit, I adore you.
Lay my life before you.
How I love you.

Then I read or recite the Prayer to the Holy Spirit in the Worship Booklet for Pilgrims: Walk to Emmaus.  In the book and in the Emmaus community we use plural pronouns but I use the personal pronoun in my morning prayer.

“Come, Holy Spirit,
Fill my heart and kindle in me the power of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and I shall be created.
And you shall renew my world.

O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit
Did instruct the hearts of the faithful,
Grant that by the same Holy Spirit
I may be truly wise
And ever enjoy your consolations.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Next I use the Prayer of Confession from the same booklet.  Again I change the pronouns to singular.

“Merciful God, I confess that I have not loved you with my whole heart.
I have failed to be obedient.
I have not done your will.
I have broken your law.
I have rebelled against your love.
I have not loved my neighbors
And I have not heard the cry of the needy.
Forgive me, I pray.
Free me for joyful obedience,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I do these first three sections almost every day.  After this beginning I may go on to Thanksgiving and Supplication or I may read Scripture first or write in my journal first.  If I’ve had a dream that has caused a strong emotion, I write that next (unless I did that very first thing.  A dream can be very fugitive so I capture it immediately if it seems important).

Last Fall I bought a One Year Bible (New International Version).  It has 365 sections.  For every day there is a section from the Old Testament, the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs.  I’m not guaranteeing that I’ll read it through in a year; it may take two or one and a half.  I’m just moving the bookmark as I go.  (I’ve tried to do the Bible in a year before.  If I fell behind, I’ve felt defeated and stopped.  This way I’ve removed the time expectation; every day there is some forward movement.)

During the Supplication part of my prayer time, I often use The Jesus Prayer and repeat it for every person on a list. On the morning of team meeting at work I often pray for everyone on the team.  On the morning of a college class I teach I pray for that group.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on (the name), your child.”

May the Lord guide and keep you as you seek to live a faithful life.

Not having grown up in a tradition with a liturgy or lectionary or a set schedule for morning and evening prayers, I’ve been on the look-out for my own spiritual practice.  I had a long list of things I thought I “should” be doing: prayer, Bible reading, meditation, journaling, paying attention to my dreams, drawing my dreams or prayers, etc.   The list was so long that many mornings I would feel defeated and condemned before I even said “Good Morning, God”.  If I did everything on my list, I would need four hours so often I practiced nothing but guilt and defeat.

Often in recent years I would hear about a certain format for morning prayer or study or meditation and decide I had found my spiritual practice. “I’ll do that daily for the rest of my life,” I’d say to myself and begin.

Three months later I would find myself doing something else.  I’d be doing something but not what I had set for myself.  More guilt and defeat would ensue.  I have even said that I felt like I had Attention Deficit Disorder of the Spiritual Life.  People who heard me say this would laugh and I would laugh but behind the laughter was a sad truth.

Recently I said all of this to my spiritual director.  She listened intently and then she said something that has transformed my spiritual life.   “Cherry, it isn’t about what you do; it’s about being faithful.”

Since hearing that, I have made a concentrated effort to spend the first thirty minutes of every day focusing on God and God’s presence and love.  I have given myself permission to do different things.  Some mornings I pray first; sometimes I read Scripture first; sometimes I journal first but whatever I do, I make a concerted effort to be aware of God’s presence for at least thirty minutes.

Interestingly a personal spiritual practice has begun to emerge.  More about that later.

THE WORST LOSS – the death of a child

They tell me
I have experienced
The Worst Loss.
Why do I recoil?

No one wants to be
The Worst:
The worst parent,
The worst teacher,
Even the worst loser.

That’s part of it.
I don’t want to be
The one at the bottom.
No one does.

But there’s more -
It isn’t true.

The Worst Loss
is any loss
a person tries to walk through
without being held
by the hand of God.

–Cherry Winkle Moore
October 24, 2010

I would like to tell you about a 36″ round painting that I call “Experiencing the Feminine Characteristics of God.”  Once she was carried into a seminary chapel by liturgical dancers and placed on an easel that was awaiting her on the chancel.  This was in 1996 at Lexington Theological Seminary (Disciples of Christ) where I took 31 hours toward my Master of Divinity degree.

That painting began with a pen and ink drawing I did at a Catholic retreat center in Monroe, Michigan in 1993.  I went there for a seven-day (mostly silent) retreat.  My mother and son were in nursing homes in Ohio and Kentucky respectively and both were failing.  I knew I needed a couple of days to cry.  On the morning of the third day I decided I’d done what I needed to do of that so I decided to change gears.  I knew that one of the sisters in the order (IHM, Immaculate Heart of Mary), Sister Sondra Schneiders, had written a book called Women and the Word so I looked for it on the shelves and found it.

Sister Sondra’s book is the best thing I have read about gender issues and Christianity.  It is a small book and contains a clearly reasoned thesis with abundant scripture to back it up.  The first chapter talks about the fact the God doesn’t have a gender: God is Spirit, God is Love.  The second chapter is about Jesus.  Jesus, no doubt, was male but she talks about what kind of male he was and talks about his relationships with women and his teachings.

Well…I thought I had changed the subject and the focus of my retreat when about then I realized that what I needed was a huge dose of that nurturing, feminine side of God.  I was wounded in my feminine relationships as I was losing my mother and my son.

I experienced that nurturing, feminine comfort.

I spent the next three days trying to draw what that experience was like.  Two years later one of those drawings was the source for the painting.

Since I was working in acrylic, I could easily paint over and change things.  I wanted the face to be somehow “universal.”  It went through several versions: skin darker then lighter, eyes more almond-shaped then less so, hair different colors.  Finally I stopped and put it away for several days.  When I came back to the studio, I realized it was finished.  I saw that what I had painted was my mother’s face with my mother-in-law’s coloring.  For ME this would be the face of the feminine side of God.  I realized I couldn’t paint that face for everybody.  For a Black woman or a Chinese women or an Indian woman the face would have to be different.  I couldn’t paint all of those.  I could only paint mine.

The response to this painting has been interesting.  I displayed it once at a Catholic church in Lexington, Kentucky and it was beautifully received.  Catholic people are accustomed to seeing a woman glorified in their churches so many people there embraced her.  One woman who was looking at it most thoughtfully told me it looked like her grandmother!  It was more universal than I thought.

The triangle represents the triune God of Christianity, the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.  Notice that the smaller woman (roughly “me”) is bound to the earth where there is a storm raging over the southeastern US; beyond the earth’s atmosphere, all is well.

EUTHANATOPIA

Robert W. Moore

May 6, 2010

A garden is a good place to die.

Why would one be entertaining thoughts that lead to such a conclusion?  For me, there are at least three reasons.

First, my wife is a hospice chaplain.  Every day she supports families and terminally ill patients who prefer to die at home rather than in an institutional setting.  This is tough work.  To support her, I listen to her stories about people who have made a definite choice about where they want to die.

Second, I recall loved ones in my family who died.  Except for those who died in accidents, virtually all of them died in hospitals or nursing homes.  I don’t intend to disparage those helping institutions, but those experiences were often pretty grim.  It’s hard to go through a bad experience in an alien environment.

Third, I’ve reached an age where the proximity of death imposes on my consciousness an awareness of its impending arrival.  I’ll only have one shot at this inevitability and I’d like to get it right.

Since death comes to all of us, it should come as no big surprise that some locations might be preferred over others for the occasion.

Consider some alternative settings to dying in a garden.  Hospital ICU?  Nursing home?  Battlefield?  Emergency room?  On the street?  In the bedroom of a woman with a jealous husband?  In prison?  I think I’ll go with the garden for the stage of my death scene.

Most people, if asked, will say they prefer to die at home.  Compared to the alternatives above, this is understandable.  Dying at home, though, can be inconvenient for others, especially if it is a prolonged process.  I really don’t like to be an inconvenience to others.

Do I really have much influence on where I will die?  Maybe a little. To die in a garden, you have to be in a garden.  By spending more time in a garden, I increase the chances that when death comes, that’s where I’ll be.

By expressing a preference for dying in a garden, I’m implicitly expressing a wish that my death be quick, sudden.  A long, lingering decline with a steadily diminishing quality of life is unpalatable.  A fatal stroke or heart attack while pulling weeds in the lettuce patch is much more convenient and dignified to me.

This is actually an incentive to be a better gardener.  By spending more time in the garden, I manage it better, observe and learn more, and add value by increasing its productivity and improving its appearance.  A Lebanese proverb says “The best fertilizer is the shadow of the gardener.”

I’ve also decided that my body should be cremated rather than embalmed.  Whether I get my wish or not, I like the thought that my ashes be added to the compost pile.  When well-composted, I, along with the green and brown stuff, will be returned to the garden to perform my final service.

There is also a pleasing cosmic and personal symmetry to dying in a garden.  Cosmically, we’re advised that humans originated in a garden.  It is pleasing, after much time away from the garden, to return on the occasion of death.

Personally, I spent much of my childhood in my mother’s and grandmother’s gardens.  I have happy thoughts about this.  After leaving those gardens for academic and career purposes, now behind me, I can think of little better to do than to return to such gardens.

Gardens are places of life nurtured by people.  But they are also places of death, implemented by gardeners.  This is called the harvest.  When it is time for me to be harvested, I’d like to be where the harvest is a blessing rather than a curse.

Eu (good)-thanos (death)-topia (place).  A garden is a good place to die—euthanatopia.

The Frame Gallery in Downtown Bryan, Texas.

Artist and gallery owner Greta Watkins arranges for a model

and we paint or draw.

This summer I have been doing pastels.

Here are some of my portraits from this summer of 2010.

Throughout the year I work thirty hours per week as a chaplain for Hospice Brazos Valley.

During the school year I teach one painting class at Blinn College in Bryan, Texas.

I often say that there is nothing like fifteen college students at the beginning of their lives to balance all the good-bye in the rest of my life.

In the summer when I am not teaching at Blinn, I attend this portrait group.

I hope you have something in your life that balances your work and pain and brings you joy.

Wooing and forming God, I thank you for my EARLY CHRISTIAN FORMATION AND EDUCATION.
For Christian parents, pastors and Sunday School teachers.
For Aunts and cousins: Dot, Jean, Dottie, Mona, Florence, Susan.
For teachers in the Fairfield, Ohio school system.
For sight and taste and touch and hearing and smell.
For reading and music.
For J.B. Holloway who asked, “Have you ever thought about going to seminary?”
For seeing Bob in the Map Room at SBTS and for marriage.
For Frank Stagg and Wayne Oates.
For my first silent retreat.
For art education and learning about Bezalel and Oholiab.
For all these people and influences, I praise you, O, God.

God of all comfort, I thank you for COMFORT IN SORROW.
For your comforting presence during the deaths of parents and in-laws.
For being there at the diagnosis of my son’s disabilities and through every hospitalization.
For your care during Lew’s life and since Lew’s death.
For being with him, closer than his breath, in every cell – not causing his suffering but suffering with him.
For providing the Home of the Innocents and Kosair Children’s Hospital:
For Sheila and Dr. Holmes and Dawn, Pattie and Debbie and Cindy Salvucci.
For all this comfort and your supportive presence, I praise you, O, God.

Creator of all things both simple and grand, I thank you for large doses of the ENJOYMENT OF NORMALCY.
For Judson’s health and enthusiasm for life.
For the blessed experience of being “JaysMom” and for being a Band parent .
I thank you for my other “children”: Kazuko and Jeanne and now
for college students at the dawn of their lives.
For all normal and typical things, I thank you, O, God.

God of Power and Blessing, I thank you especially for SPIRITUAL SUSTENANCE.
For spiritual friends and guides: Craig, Rodney, Becky, Lorrie, Sister Kathleen, E.B., Don, Cam …
For exposure to great preaching in many places at many times.
For seminary education and chaplaincy training
And especially for prayer.
For all these spiritual blessings, I thank you, O, God.

Hard-working Creator God, I thank you for fulfilling EMPLOYMENT.
For the opportunity to be Artist-In-Residence at the Federal Correctional Institution
– and for not getting that first job at Asbury.
Then later for teaching at Asbury College.
For chaplaincy jobs at UK Medical Center and St. Francis Cabrini Hospital
And now for work at Hospice Brazos Valley and Blinn College.
For all the jobs I have had, I thank you.

Relational God, who reaches toward me and all human beings, I thank you for COMMUNITY.
For family.
For friends: Greta, Joan, my book club, Sister Kathleen, Peggy, Sunday School classes, Al-Anon friends and the Brazos Valley Emmaus Community.
For church friends in Hamilton, Ohio
And Lexington, Kentucky
and Alexandria, Louisiana
and Bryan/College Station, Texas.
I am so grateful for finding old friends on the Internet
And for Facebook so I don’t need to lose them again.
For these and all other blessings, I praise and thank you, God,
my Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

Amen.
– Cherry Winkle Moore