Welcoming Spring

Saturday, April 10, 2010


As I was trying to compose my essay on Easter for presentation at the Hospital, it occurred to me that I had not deeply connected to the rebirth surrounding me. I have always enjoyed being in the midst of nature. One of my earliest memories is of lying on my back in the meadow behind our house in Harrisville, Michigan. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old. I remember feeling a part of the earth, connected by invisible cords to the growing, never silent but rarely loud life beneath and around me in that meadow. Grass, insects, birds, an occasional toad, mole cat, and the neighbors’ cattle all around me, soaking up the sun as I was, gaining strength and living only in the present.

I decided to regain that connection, and went out to my own tiny meadow, my front yard. Thirty feet by ten, it is the dusty apron of our old woman of a home, anchored by a boulder left by the builders 80 years ago. Curtis and I tore off the scaly-bug-infested Euonymus several years ago, and I dropped pieces of lichen sedum and moss on it to give those colonists a head start. This year, the rock is the centerpiece. I sat next to it for quite a while, until my bones protested the inactivity and chill. But I did begin a quiet return to the joy that 8 year old boy felt.

I understand the cycle of apparent death, sleep, rebirth and growth in the temperate Northeastern climate. Writings about Easter have all too often used the season as a metaphor. But there is a different message there, too. As the cycle turns, the individual plant, or insect or vole may not return with the spring. We can and do change roles from sprouting spear of green one spring, to the rotting thatch of the next. We are not entitled to be the green; we have to accept being the mulch eventually. But I am having a hard time accepting that. I continue to rage against the dying of the light. I continue to grasp for, continue to crave, an assurance for the future, and for a legacy. My egoism refuses to accept being mulch for a lawn. I must have significance, I must have permanence, I must have assurance. My attachment to these desires only yields for a moment as I sit on the cold ground and feel the sun warming my rock, feeding my crocuses and daffodils. As the week progressed toward Easter, I had to stop frequently to restore that feeling of connection to the cycles, big and small. I am constantly trying to live in the present and to remain observant of those around me and of myself. It is ofttimes hard.

Thursday evening, I was called to the Hospital to attend in the Emergency Department. I sat with the spouse and good friend of a man who had collapsed and died at home. He was 57. The woman pleaded with me to anoint him, even though she knew I was not a priest. The man asked me to “pray him into heaven.” I sat and listened to them tell me about the deceased, and then prayed over the body for them. They were at the stage of asking why their mate and friend had been cut down and taken away so quickly. I listened to them work on it. It didn’t take much talking on my part. After they left, I sat with the body a while longer. I just sat and tried to keep still.

On my way out, I stopped to greet the operators who call me in when needed. It is a good idea to check, so that they know I have been in and they can let me know if any people have been told to wait for the day shift. There had been one, and I went to see him. He has been in and out of the Hospital for several months. He was HIV+ when I first met him. Now he has full blown AIDS, has suffered a stroke and his wife has to be begged to bring in his 4 year old son. I sat with him as he cried and swore to me as his witness that he regretted all his sins, and implored God to relieve him of his pain and sorrow. We cried together a while, and then he told me to go home. I was called again in the wee hours to attend in the MICU, for a man who coded three times during the night, and whose family had decided to change to DNR. While I was barreling up the expressway to get there, he coded again, died and the family went home. I arrived to an apologetic staff including a young resident who was having trouble coping. I stayed with them for a while. I prayed over the body and blessed the staff, and made sure the chart was completed that the patient had received spiritual care as well as medical.

A few hours later I was in the State Correctional Facility, talking to two men in their twenties about what brought them to prison. (Not their crimes, but their lives.) They told about their childhood and youth. As they spoke, I could palpably feel their pain from abandonment, dysfunctional parenting, and poverty and for one, lack of treatment. But I could offer only a listening ear, not solutions. For them, they have already arrived at the destination of criminality. Serving time, I have noticed, does not make one a better person. It will be up to them, and to the other men in the group, to talk, and think, and learn and change habits that at 23 or 26 are already ingrained and will be hard to see, let alone alter. I hope that those two men will find, in the death of their sentences, the time, change and friendship to make a change in how they live in this world. That their lives may re-start in prison, to grow and blossom when they are released.

The promise of summer, of autumn and winter too, and of repeated turnings of the seasons is built into the tiny bud of an ornamental red maple tree. The promise of apparent death and resurrection and the quiet blasting of life out of what we mortals perceive to be a tomb are found there, too. We can only sense ourselves as part of that flow. Any effort to resist, to withstand that onward rush is futile. While I am a green bud, I can strive to be a great green bud. I hope to be great mulch, too.