First Prize Winner (one of three) 2003 Richard
Borden Sermon Award
“The Sum of all Parts”
The Rev. Kathleen C. Rolenz
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Cleveland, Ohio
I didn't know the woman who lay on the autopsy table. Only her
name, which was attached to a card on her big toe, gave me any clue
that she had once lived. Who was she, I wondered, as I stood there,
gowned from head to toe in protective garb? Had she been born in
Virginia? Did she fall in love and get married? Had her large body
borne children? Did she have faith? Did she know God? And then,
for that matter, what was I, the chaplain, doing here, in this basement
room of the hospital, with the hum of pop music, the smell of chemicals
and the sound of trickling water in the background? Most of us in
our right minds would not want to be standing where I was that day
in June, waiting for the autopsy to begin. Most of us don't even
want to hear about such things, because facing the end of life is
so painful-and so difficult, that we can barely bring ourselves
to talk about it. Frankly, even the thought of writing this morning's
sermon made me nervous, because we come to church, in part, to be
cheered--to be reminded of the importance of life--to be lifted
up and strengthened for the living of these days-and these moments.
The other reason writing this sermon made me nervous was because
it's so personal. This particular sermon is not about what others
have written or said about death, as important as that is. It's
an experience about losing faith, and finding God one summer's day,
in the autopsy suite with a woman I never knew-and never would.
The forensic pathologist told me that I could leave at any time,
but if I thought I was going to pass out--would I please let someone
know so that I don't hurt myself falling down? The woman in charge
of the autopsy was instructing a resident on how to make the first
incision into the body. Seeing the scalpel poised, I held my breath
and said a prayer.
Throughout the course of my time at the hospital, I had become good
at saying prayers with others--and even saying them to myself. But
in recent months, my ability to pray with integrity had all but
disappeared. I had begun to wonder if there was a God to pray with,
or to, or about. It was a tremendous loss, especially for a person
who makes her life's work engaged in a relationship with the ineffable.
This loss happened gradually, over time, over months of witnessing
human struggle. In June, I met a woman my own age, who had given
up on life. She had been born with a heart defect, and had not been
expected to live. Miraculously, she had lived well into her thirties,
but always with the threat of death dangling over her head. Finally,
the stress of living with her own mortality made her decide to give
up on life. "What's the point," she asked me one day.
"I just
don't see the purpose of my life any longer. I'd rather be dead."
I argued with her, pleaded with her, begged her, cried in front
of her--not to give up on life--not to allow her fears to drive
her to suicide. I read her passages from the Bible and from other
sacred texts to try to lift up her spirits--to help her reconnect
with something deeper than her own pain. Nothing worked.
The woman was dying of a broken heart. I had always believed that
the phrase "broken heart" meant being disappointed in
love, but in her case, it was a profound disappointment with life.
After many visits, and after many conversations, my heart broke
too. One day, after talking with her, I felt in every fiber of my
being, that she was right. Daily I had witnessed the bizarre, unexpected,
always painful and often devastating effects on the body. Whether
enduring grueling chemotherapy, or repairing the body after an accident,
or giving birth to a still-born child, I saw and felt, maybe for
the first time in my life, how full of pain and suffering life really
is. And there, with a broken heart inside, and a broken heart in
front of me, I lost God.
On one certain day that summer-there was nothing. No God. No Presence.
No comforter, no guide, no helper, nothing. Absolutely nothing mattered.
There was no meaning in anything--not my work, which until that
time had been difficult, but enormously satisfying. My friends --
I hadn't spoken to many of them since I got married -- and I didn't
know if they cared. My clothes, house, car, books - everything that
I had gathered around me with satisfaction and comfort seemed ultimately
disposable and not worth keeping.
The members of my Clinical Pastoral Education Group were alarmed.
Once I was an active participant in discussions, now I just sat,
with eyes downcast. Whatever issues they discussed with passion
didn't touch me, or make any difference, because we were all going
to die. Any benevolence I had felt about the universe had disappeared
in the stark reality of the fragility of our bodies and how that
affects our spirit. It was a place devoid of meaning, depth, connection
and hope.
Maybe you too, have been in a similar place. In Christian history
and tradition, it's called the way of the desert--that plane were
everything flattens out into a landscape of emptiness. That is a
place that is even beyond comfort or relief. There is no-thing.
It is what St. John of the Cross calls the dark night of the soul.
And for some, it more than just one dark night--it is a state of
being that seems unrelenting in its flatness. The earth turns its
face away from the sun--brilliant leaves fall into the soft, rich
earth, stark trees bare their limbs like bones, and the joy of living
seems hard to find.
With the incision made one of the first tasks was to remove the
heart, nestled underneath its ribcage embrace. At rest--how small
and seemingly insignificant the heart is compared to the other,
larger organs. We call a person hard-hearted, which is impossible,
but again, hardening of the arteries will also cause either dementia
or demise. We say "soft heart" or "stout-heart"
or "heart-less"--all common phrases which remind us of
just how important this small and vital organ is. A broken heart,
however, will simply not work--whether by loss of love or loss of
life.
Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson knew what it was like to
live with a broken heart. His beloved, young wife, Ellen had died.
Since her death, his life had unraveled. Professionally, he could
no longer accept his ministerial role. Love had died and his career
was falling apart. For more than a year and two months he was in
the habit of walking from Boston to her grave in Roxbury. Then,
on March 29, 1832, he wrote in his journal, "I visited Ellen's
tomb and opened the coffin." We don't know exactly what moved
Emerson to do this, but we do know that he had a powerful craving
for direct, personal unmediated experience. As grisly as this must
have been for Emerson, it turned a corner for him. Shortly after
that experience, he wrote a sermon entitled "The God of the
Living." He would no longer live with the dead. "Let us
express our astonishment, " he wrote in his journal, "before
we are swallowed up by the jaws of the abyss."
As I watched the various parts of the body being taken apart, weighed,
analyzed, something began to shift inside of me. A thin vein of
awe began to course through me, and an episode from the TV Show
"Picket Fences" came to mind. In that show, Carter, the
town's coroner and pathologist tells a young, squeamish doctor that
she should think of the people in the morgue as "patients who
have granted us a great privilege--to enter a cathedral where no
one has set foot before. This is the place where death nurtures
life."
Standing there, in the midst of the autopsy room--with the sound
of water trickling and flesh being pulled away under the scalpel's
exactness, as beads of perspiration crowned the young resident's
forehead, I too, began to feel as if I were standing in a cathedral--a
place of such vast possibility--of such spacious height and depth
and breadth--a place where the awareness of death nurtures and enhances
life itself.
The last part of the autopsy was the most difficult, I was told.
If I wanted to leave before they opened the skull and removed her
brain, they wouldn't think I was weak or a chicken. Even some residents
have a difficult time with this part. "No," I said. I
wanted to stay.
I saw, for the first and probably only time, a human brain. "Would
you like to hold it?" the forensic assistant asked me. Numbly,
I said yes. Looking into the folds of the brain, into this incredible
organ, silently, I began to weep. It resembled a cathedral window,
folded and veined with delicate strands of blue against opaque tan.
I realized at that moment, that this woman was more than just the
sum of her parts. It's as if I could see her life--the fullness
of her being--a woman who had lived and loved, who had eaten fried
chicken the night before. She was someone who had listened to music,
whose hands had touched children, whose palms may have lifted up
in praise. And though her life was over, she was so much more than
what I held in my hands. In fact, my hands could not contain all
of her.
It was there, in that room, that whatever Presence I had called
God returned. It was not the easy God of childhood--nor was it the
intellectual God of seminary. Nor was it even the emotional God
of suffering. It was the voice that, when asked "what is your
name?" simply said, "I am that I am." It was the
void of nothing and the fullness of presence--in that moment--in
that room--flooding the gates of despair with a deep appreciation
for this life, and for that Presence, that walks with us. It is
the God that lives and moves and has her being not only in our brain--not
only in our hearts, but in all the inward parts--in every inward
part.
We fear the unknown and for good reason. We don't know what the
spring will bring--if the flowers will bloom or fail, if the projects
we seed will take root, if the relationships we strive to sustain
will flourish. Even in the midst of our uncertainty, there does
abide an order, a rightness and a perfection underneath. I believe
this is the meaning of faith--to realize that scarred or whole,
we are fearfully and wonderfully formed; and that every body is
a temple in which the Holy Spirit dwells and that even death cannot
diminish this.
Why God chose to make her Presence known to me in the midst of that
place, I have no idea. Why God transformed my ennui and sense of
meaninglessness with a renewed sense of hope and deep appreciation
for life, is still a mystery. What I found there, while staring
down into the body cavity of a woman I did now know--and never would
know--was a strange sort of happiness--clear through to the bone.
What I discovered that day was the faith that comes not from indoctrination
from the outside, but from the Spirit of God, bursting out from
inside us.
The Psalmist knew something about that presence that followed me
out of the autopsy room and into the rest of my life--"I praise
you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
Borden Award
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