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Last year on Pentecost I baptized an infant named Diana Lynn. No one but her mother came to watch. Diana was stillborn. Her mother, a visitor in our city, had waited hours for the hospital staff to find a pastor who would help her hand her child to God. Baptism was what she specifically demanded, …
Continue reading “A Pastoral and Theological Response to Losses in Pregnancy”
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The church, however, was noticeably silent. In fact, since 1981 when AIDS was first described, the personal tragedies and social failures associated with the disease appear to have been largely ignored by the church — except for those strident segments that view AIDS as God’s retribution on a sinful people. This silence may imply assent …
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To be sure, there are other things that must be added. But only secondarily. One crucial test of our commitment to the sanctity of human life in our time will be whether as a society we will spend the money, take the time and run the risk required to treat people with AIDS as persons, …
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A sense of culpability in illness and death can provoke much personal anguish. To some extent such anxiety has always been a reality: across time and cultures, people have struggled with the connection between human behavior and misfortune, especially sickness and death. Probably even the most rational or secular individuals have never fully believed that …
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Back in the ‘50s I wrote an article for a nursing magazine to sort out my frustrations at the way terminal patients were treated There was then no “effective management of pain” or hospice care. Frequently patients were not even told that their days were numbered. Death was seen as a failure and embarrassment to …
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Receiving a phone call from my friend in Iowa that muggy Wednesday morning in August did not seem unusual at first; we maintained regular contact. But his response to my question "How are you doing?" stopped conversation rather than started it. "Kevin just called from Indianapolis. Brenda died last night in a hiking accident." I …
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“Daddy, am I handicapped?” my eight-year-old daughter inquired one day recently. “Who said you were?” I asked, defenses rising. “The kids at church.” They were right. She is a multiply handicapped child, and she was bound to hear that word applied to herself sooner or later. Perhaps it was better to hear it at church …
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After my husband, Hyung Goo, discovered he had AIDS, the question of healing came up repeatedly especially after we began to tell people about this illness. A lot of his relatives, in particular thought that what you should do about AIDS was pray for healing. Hyung Goo wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this. …
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What if science could demonstrate that original sin is something we inherit from our families either through the genes or our upbringing or both? And if science could show us how we inherit a predisposition toward sin, might science also show us how to heal the soul and harvest fruits of the Spirit? For instance, …
Continue reading “Holy Therapy: Can a Drug do the Work of the Spirit?”
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When I was just beginning to do volunteer work at Cabrini Hospice in Manhattan, I visited an emaciated, dispirited man who was dying of cancer of the larynx. It was all but impossible for him to speak. The few words he did manage emerged in a whisper that seemed to come from the elaborately bandaged …
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Aids is not the only illness that seriously damages the immune system. An increasing number of individuals suffer from immune system dysregulation, also known as chemical sensitivity or ecologic illness. Since this problem cannot be transmitted from one person to another, its victims, unlike those of AIDS, are not deliberately ostracized by society. However, their …
Continue reading “How the Church Can Help the Chemically Sensitive”
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BOOK REVIEW: At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness By Arthur Frank. Houghton Mifflin, 144 pp, $17.95. At the end of a new book on the hermeneutics of testimony, Arthur Frank cites a “Far Side” cartoon: A bearded man stands at the front door, dripping wet, in rags. The woman opening the door …
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A 75-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital for treatment of a malignancy that had spread throughout her body. "Dismal prognosis" was noted on the chart. Many laboratory tests were performed and chemotherapy — requiring intravenous punctures — was resumed, even though studies had shown that this type of cancer does not respond significantly, if …
Continue reading “Intensive Care: The Crucifixion of the Dying?”
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In The Biblical story, God tests his faithful servant Job to see whether Job will stay devoted to God even if God takes everything away from him. Now you don’t lose your family, health and possessions, as Job did, without falling into a terrible funk. It’s possible, then, to understand Job’s story as being about …
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The way people deal with Alzheimer’s disease is greatly influenced not only by theological beliefs but also by the nature of this particular illness, an illness that the late medical essayist Lewis Thomas in 1981 labeled the “disease of the century.” One should not downplay the horrors associated with any illness. But Alzheimer’s and other …
Continue reading “Living with Alzheimer’s: Body, Soul and the Remembering Community”
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Everyone who lives with a long-term illness thinks about suicide at some time during that illness. My hunch is that these emotions usually come early in the disease, during the first struggles with the reality of chronic illness. The second most common occurrence of those sentiments comes, I think, at times of crisis in the …
Continue reading “Living with Chronic Illness: Why Should I Go On?”
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"I’m so ashamed," the young widow told me over the phone, weeping softly. She had called about a self-help support group I lead for the young newly widowed. Her husband had died of cancer at 38, after only three years of marriage. Her tears were occasioned not by the pain of her horrible loss, sharpened …
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Expecting Adam, by Martha Beck. Berkley, 328 pp., paperback. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, by Rayna Rapp. Routledge, 361 pp., paperback. The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society, by Hans S. Reinders. University of Notre Dame Press, 280 pp. Choosing Naia, by Mitchell Zuckoff. Beacon, 301 pp. We woke one morning last November …
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Living in Alabama, I encounter a lot of intuitive spelling. I am no spelling snob. In fact, a roadside sign for “Bowled Peanuts” can brighten my whole day as can a hand-painted billboard exhorting me to “Give Your Loved One A Missage For Christmas.” Never, though, have I taken so much pleasure from a spelling …
Continue reading “My Life on Antidepressants: Taming the Beast”
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Four days after a 72-year-old retired government worker was brought to a southern California hospital’s emergency ward by his 12-year-old “companion,” a county welfare worker dropped in on the pair and initiated legal action to have the child made a dependent of the court. The old man and the child were living, the worker’s report …
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A scene of pathos awaits anyone undertaking ministry to a person with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The pathos may be glimpsed in this portion of a letter written by a mother whose son had recently died of AIDS-related causes. The letter was addressed to the pastor who briefly attended this small-town family gathered around …
Continue reading “Pastoral Care for Persons with AIDS and for Their Families”
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At the most unexpected moments it slips people its dark poison. One scarcely notices the initial sting. Slowly, insidiously, the poison spreads until the victim finds herself cut off from life by a gray veil. The monster, what Winston Churchill, a longtime sufferer, called "the Black Dog." is depression. Medical statistics indicate that in the …
Continue reading “Shedding Light on the Darkness of Depression”
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A wintry heart: a “being toward death.” Winter, the season when a pole of the earth slants farthest from the sun, finds the shadows longest at noon. Somewhere around December 21 in the northern hemisphere, or June 21 in the southern the tilt is the greatest. The long chill begins. Before that time, in the …
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If life is to be meaningful and satisfying, we must attach ourselves deeply and fully to people and causes. Yet everything to which we can and do attach is finite. There are, of course, steady things like family and friends, but even in relationship to these, we ourselves are constantly changing. Because of this ever-changing …
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Recently my aging parents visited my home in California. My mother brought along precious tapes and asked me to transfer them to cassettes which she could play on the small machine I gave her last Christmas. The reels she had packed in her suitcase were stories of our family. Mostly they were rites of passage: …
Continue reading “The Last Passage: Re-visioning Dying, Death, and Funeral”
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I: Ritual How should I act, when I get in there? What should I say? My steps sound along the empty corridor, deceptive with its yellow-papered walls and neat reproductions, linoleum gleaming. NO VISITORS. CAUTION. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. How do you play with someone who is half-paralyzed? I enter; the ritual begins. In the first …
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Introduction Any decision regarding the nature and necessity of care, especially the attitude towards and the care of AIDS/HIV survivors is not a decision that is made in abstraction, but a decision that impacts on the meaning and understanding of life, not just the life of the individual in question, but also life in …
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We usually speak of mental illness when the dynamic synthesis of diverse and often opposing forces which constitutes the self becomes seriously unbalanced. But such a classification is misleadingly selective, for the commonly recognized states of self-estrangement are certainly not the only possible ones, perhaps not even the most important ones. Through the very awareness …
Continue reading “The Wounded Self: The Religious Meaning of Mental Suffering”
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Many pastoral counselors routinely recommend — or even require — that their alcohol-dependent counselees attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. However, a substantial number of people drop out of A.A., and some data suggest that half of A.A. ‘s new participants do not continue after 90 days. Denial of the problem is certainly a major reason people …
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“Heaven has as much to do with life before death as with life after death.” Steven Clover was able to voice that vision in the last months before he died of AIDS, as his body fought off rare forms of cancer, pneumonia and other disease. Once dapper and golden-haired. he was the essence of a …
Continue reading “We Are the Church Alive, the Church with AIDS”
