WHAT I LEARNED FROM MEMORIAL SERVICES IN ROCKFORD IL

Rockford Illinois sunset

While I was in Rockford, IL, as summer minister and student hospital chaplain, I “did” three memorial services.  All three had something to do with babies, but only one was for a baby.

A couple who had a teenaged daughter discovered that the mother was pregnant.  Since all three people had plans, schedules, spaces, that had no room or time in them for an infant, they sat down together to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy.  They decided that a new life would be such a delight that they would simply rework their lives and they did, converting an office to a nursery, cancelling coveted work, and rethinking their life goals.  

But the baby girl died before the pregnancy was complete in spite of a C-section that hoped to save her.  The three were devastated.  Then they went to work to understand it.  The decided that this event in its demands and self-examination was a sort of message about their lives and that they ought to be grateful for new awareness.  The memorial was in their home with the fireplace for an altar.  They designed the service but asked me to deliver a homily, which I used to imagine a life for the baby -- her skinned knees, her graduation ceremony, her bridal gown.  It was the first time I ever heard Barbour’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”  With wry humour, friends provided a devil’s food cake and an angel food cake.  Who knows how that little beginning life would have turned out?

The second service was for a woman who was elderly and had been in a nursing home with a stroke for some time.  My practice was to go talk to the family about the person before composing the service, but no one seemed to know much about this woman except that she loved to play bridge.  A single mother, she had a son but he didn’t know much about his mother.  I inquired around the congregation to find who her friends were and finally made contact with them.

The story came pouring out.  The women in their eighties said “we were brides together”.  They told about a woman who had cared for her bedridden sister and mother for decades, remaining cheerful, giving, uncomplaining.  She had been born back East, sent to the best finishing schools and generally indulged.  The Depression wiped out the money and WWII wiped out her marriage.  From then on her life was largely drudgery in a nothing job.  But everyone insisted she had never had an unkind thing to say about anyone and she never got down in the dumps.  As St. Francis said, “Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.”  But it won’t make you rich or famous.

The third memorial service was for a man who had been told as a pre-schooler that his heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever so he should expect to die young.  But he didn’t.  When I went interviewing, I heard about a flower-grower who grew where he was planted.  He stayed on in the family home, caring for both parents until their deaths — because he unexpectedly went on living.  He was far from gloomy, a fine ballroom dancer as well as a good Swedish singer.

The most intriguing story I heard was that he had a policy of avoiding marriage because he wouldn’t live long enough to raise any children.  He would go a certain distance, even fall in love, but then withdraw.  There was only one time that it was very hard to break off from a woman he truly would have liked to marry.  I put this in the homily.

The service was in a funeral home.  At the end I got a little confused and went through a curtain that I thought was the entrance to a kind of waiting room.  Gratefully, I kicked off my heels, and stood catching my breath.  Then the funeral director directed the entire audience through that door and on to a room where refreshments were to be served, all of them filing past me and shaking hands, many of them older Swedish folks with rosy cheeks and sweet accents.

Even in my stocking feet I was taller than some of the ladies.  One pulled my head down so she could whisper in my ear, “I was the one he truly loved and wanted to marry!”  I hugged her and said how lucky she was.  Then down the line another woman did the same thing.  In the end there were half-a-dozen women who had secretly and confidently believed that they were this man’s true love.  He was a gardener of hearts, growing each with love even after breaking off.

I want to mention that one of the most memorable parishioners, a woman who had been a close confidant of Alan Deale, was Mabel Johnson, ninety years old and far from dead.  She was in the hospital for damage from a fall.  She had been a nurse in this very hospital since 1913.

During WWI she was an army nurse in France, working desperately with very little equipment in a tent hospital.  Deadly influenza was burning through the land and the doctor caught it.  The nurse working with Mabel said to her, “Mabel, there’s just this doctor and the two of us left.  There’s only one thing to do.  I’ll take care of all the men as best I can.  You stay right here and devote everything you have in you to saving our doctor.  We’ve GOT to pull him through.”  And Mabel did.

This next paragraph is quoted from my “Seminary Saga” journal.  “Mabel can identify the first moment she began to question theism.  A young soldier was brought in with his face covered in bandages.  Mabel unwound the bandage to see what kind of wound was underneath and the whole face came off in her hands, leaving a live, grinning skull.  Flooded with nausea, she stumbled out of the tent and threw up.  ‘There can’t be a God if He has the power to stop something like that and won’t do it.’

“Then she went back inside to stand beside the doctor and hand him the instruments while he tried to save the faceless soldier.  ‘You okay?’ he asked.  ‘Yes,’ she said.  ‘Good,’ said the doctor.  ‘It’ll never be that bad again.’”

When I was worn out and discouraged, I went to sit by Mabel and even if she were sleeping, I was renewed.

About this time Daisy Bingham, who worked in the office of First Unitarian of Portland, OR, sent me a big packet of sermons and clippings.  In the “Order of Celebration” on April 27 that year this was the unison reading.  I have no idea who wrote it.  Possibly Alan Deale.

To be deeply religious is

To have a passionate interest in the wholeness of existence,

To seek for the connecting tissue in the apparent

     separations,

To turn from disorder to seek the unity which lies hidden in

     diversity,

To pull hatred inside out and expose it as the dark side of 

     love,

To find no absolute end to the significance of life, not even in

     the event of death,

To seek to live less deformed and more gracious lives,

To have faith that at the center of it all is goodness and

     strength to enable us beyond our expectations,

And to turn our foolishness and evil into wisdom and beauty.

CLINICAL PASTORAL EDUCATION IN ROCKFORD, IL: Memory

The Rockford UU Church designed by Belluschi

This Saturday, February 24, 2018, is scheduled for the memorial for Alan Deale, which is being held in Rockford, IL, where he so much enjoyed his prime years — as much when riding the lawnmower as collaborating with architects to build a church.  When I knew Alan he was in Portland, urging that church into the future.  When I decided to enter seminary, part of which was Clinical Pastoral Education, a grueling summer of service in a hospital, a penitentiary, or some other high pressure setting, I asked for Alan's advice on where to apply and naturally he said Rockford.

Throughout the summer — as throughout my four years of seminary (’78-’82) — I sent out a weekly one-page single-spaced essay in a sort of proto-blog.  I have those pages in two binders at my side right now.  I’d been thinking about quoting these materials and this seems a good time to do some of that, maybe for a couple of days.

As student chaplains, we visited room-to-room with patients, responded to emergencies, did a lot of reading, and sat in a circle to discuss it all and plumb the depths of ourselves — not theology.  And the looming issues of parenting.  One author, a man named Elliott, suggests “that there are basically two kinds of human love: the kind of unconditional love, equal love that a mother gives, and the kind of respectful love that can only be earned by performance . .  . If a person has been forced to try to earn love, his life will be marked by a kind of chronic anxious insecurity.  On the other hand, if a person had been illicitly given respect without having earned it . . . he may well (have an) inability to know how to gain appropriate respect from others and from himself. . . “  This idea has become near-dogma for a lot of people.  Elliott suggests that the cultural problem of the time was weak and absent fathers, perhaps connected to the death of God, which was actually the death of the WWII culture of Generals in wartime, the death of heroism.

There was another death, at least an attempt to strangle pride.  I sort of addressed it this way.  “I — like many Unitarian-Universalists — have very high standards of behavior.  I rarely drop out any of these “rules.”  I still find it very important to be on time, honest, chaste, hard-working, etc.  And as I’ve come more and more into contact with modern psychology, I have only added more rules: self-acceptance, congruence, the ability to be a limited human.  This leaves me with a Catch-22: how to be brilliant and humble at the same time.  How to cover all the bases without getting myself stretched so thin that my personality starts to crack."

"I’ve been very hard on myself.  But I’ve also been hard on patients who wouldn’t try, peers who seemed to be underachieving, nurses who shirked, and — more than anything else — authority figures who were neurotic and bumbling.”

“. . . it’s been very hard for others to accept my almost punitive idealism.  If a minister has an obligation to be an exemplar — and I believe he or she does — then what freedom do I have to choose my own way, particularly if it is so rigorous that others are intimidated instead of inspired?  Must I lower my standards in order to be good enough to be a minister.”  (I left congregational ministry in 1988.)

This is pretty amusing — the grandiose pretentiousness of it — but it becomes more relevant when considering our present politics.  The Reverend Harris Riordan, who was with us at Meadville but then transferred to Union in New York City, was pretty hip to a lot of things.  (She’s been the minister in Boca Raton for many years.)  She had a theory.  “Every woman she knows who has been a little older, a little experienced, and the veteran of a little therapy, has had a very bad time with CPE.  Harris believes this is due to the fact that CPE was originally designed for ministerial candidates who were very uptight young men whose mothers had carefully taught them never to have “bad” emotions.. For them, CPE still works.  In fact, many of the supervisors are uptight young men who fell in love with the opportunity to get angry, sad, or ecstatic — because they hadn’t known it was an option before.  For them to face a raging forty-year-old, who has read more books than the supervisor has, is to be thrown into the teeth of a dragon.”

My supervisor said I was “the angriest, stubbornest, most complicated and resistant person he’d ever met.”  If you consider this in terms of the ethnic women now coming into the UU realm, refusing the authority of white males, this is rather explanatory.  I doubt this supervisor knew many Latino or black women.

While I was in Rockford, I “house-sat” in three different homes.  The first was Leny Van Roojen’s, the second was David Weissbard’s, and the third was the Oehlke’s.  The family included a small boy named Kahn, who was adopted from Vietnam.  Last night I googled everyone and was shocked to see that Kahn is now forty!  Leny Van Roojen has passed on.  They tell me that Rev. Weissbard is enjoying a bit of pulpit supply though he’s observed his fifty year anniversary of ordination.

The Oehlke house had a swimming pool — not a fancy gunnite one, but rather a cement block dugout with a vinyl liner.  Nevertheless, it had the immense luxury of raspberry bushes that grew out over the water, so that one could float and pick berries at the same time.  And the fireflies, those magical insects, abounded.  It was magical.

This was the first time I’d slept in a waterbed, heated to blood temperature.  The bedroom was an upstairs screen porch, open on three sides to treetops that rustled all night in the breeze.  In memory I connect this house to a night I was on-call, sleeping in a chilly basement room in the hospital in order to respond quickly to emergencies.  The Rockford hospital was a regional hub for babies so desperately in trouble that they arrived by Life Flight.  

On this morning before dawn a baby came with her father who wanted her to be baptized immediately in case she died.  The mother was too ill to travel so we didn’t know her wishes.  Brushing aside dogma about UU’s not baptizing, the father and the nurses on duty in infant ICU made a little circle around the isolette.  There was no stone font of Holy Water: the nurse handed me a sterilized cotton ball dipped in distilled water.  

Just as I squeezed a few drops onto the tiny wizened creature, the sun burst over the horizon and flooded the room with light.  I said, “This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us be glad and rejoice in it.”  

In a while I went home to that near-amniotic floating bed in the treetops and gladly slept.  (The baby survived.)  That was in Rockford, IL., a place where I touched the Sacred.