January 14th, 2007, UU Service

Life, Death, Love, Medicine & Miracles

Sermon by Miriam Bishop

Reading: Prayer by Chief Yellow Lark, Lakota Sioux

Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds,
And whose breath gives life to all the world-
Hear me.

I come before you, one of your many children.
I am small and weak,
And I need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold
The red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made,
My ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make we wise so that I may know the things
You have taught my people,
The lesson you have hidden in every leaf and rock.

I seek strength
Not to be superior to my brother,
But to be able to master myself.

Make me ever ready to come to you
With clean hands and straight eyes,
So when life fades as a fading sunset,
My spirit may come to you without shame.

Hymn: "Breathe on Me, Breath of God"

Sermon:

Warning! What I'm about to say may disturb you. It contains the word God a lot, and mentions a few other names as well, but it's basically a Unitarian-Universalist message. So relax, and translate that word into whatever is meaningful for you: Universal Consciousness, Divine Power, whatever.

The text that I refer to in the title of this presentation is Love, Medicine & Miracles by Dr. Bernie Siegel, plus his sequel Peace, Love & Healing. Other books have helped me, too, such as Loving What Is by Byron Katie, Home with God and Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch.

I'm going to talk about elephant theology, and spiritual flat tires, and blindfolded angels in gilded cages. But first let me tell you why I am up here delivering a sermon. And to do that I'm going to have to share with you some personal details of my life. Most of you are not strangers to me, but sometimes when I meet someone new, they look at my superficial trappings and presume I lead a charmed life. Well, Now, in some ways it is a charmed life, but I'm sure this new person would not care to trade places with me. Four months ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and told I had about four months to live [looks at her watch] , so ... I could go at any moment.

That's not even the bad news. There are worse things than death: unrequited love, a disabling injury, a bitter divorce, homelessness, and having your life's dream pulled out from under you. Alone, any one of these misfortunes can be borne and coped with, but I suffered them all in too short a space of time and found that I could not bear them alone. I turned inward to find spiritual solace, and I turned outward, eventually, to share my pain with my family and friends.

But for a while, I was filled with rage and a hatred that was poisoning me from the inside out. My immune system was crippled. I know that is How I got cancer. But Why did I get cancer? I got cancer because I asked for it.

Holistic medicine looks at possible answers to questions like, "Why did I need this disease?" And I was able to look back and found a point some years ago when I was suicidal. I didn't have the courage to do myself in, so I remember I prayed to God to give me a terminal illness. I asked him to spare some young mother who was needed by her children, and take me instead. Be careful what you pray for. God answers prayers.

I'm not a Methodist, but I joined the Methodist Church choir, and discovered that I had been called there for a reason. Pastor Steve's counseling specialty was in one of the areas in which I suffered, and when I questioned whether he would be willing to give pastoral care to a non-Methodist, he said "That doesn't matter; I'll do it."

During our counseling sessions, I shared with him that I needed a place for a mediation session and someone who knew my history to sit beside me in the mediation. Pastor Steve said "I'll do it." During the mediation a blockage to resolution came up because of a difficulty in finding someone to do some manual labor. Pastor Steve said "I'll do it."

After a semi-successful mediation, I returned to my home, but too late to restore my crippled immune system. I collapsed with what I was afraid might be hepatitis, or liver failure from the amount of tranquilizers and drugs I had been taking to help me function in the mediation during the day and to help me sleep at night. After seven hours in the emergency room in Brewster, they couldn't figure out what was ailing me, so they released me with instructions to go home and avoid any stress. The first person I called to whine to about my pitiable condition was -- you guessed it, Pastor Steve.

The next important friend who stepped into this whirlwind was Dr. Elizabeth here in Twisp. She argued (ahem, consulted) with several doctors in Wenatchee and eventually convinced them and me that I should go there, immediately. My friend, Suzanne of the North, jumped into the milieu, and drove me all the way to Wenatchee. A few days later she picked me up at the hospital, and I shared with her the bad news that I had just learned -- I was terminally ill and only had a short time left. We cried together. The next day my sister arrived to be at my side during the amazing struggle that lay ahead.

That's the basic background, and I'll continue that story later, but first let's get into the sermon part of this sermon. I love analogies and parables, and this is one I'm particularly fond of.

I call it Elephant Theology: Imagine a huge beast composed of intense spiritual white light. While we are alive we all must wear blindfolds, because the light from this ever-present entity is too intense for mortal, human eyes.

Imagine then a collection of blindfolded religious leaders, each touching a different part of this entity and each insisting that he has found the answer to life's mystery. Unfortunately, making contact with only one component of this beast, each is devoutly attached to one fundamentalist idea.

One is in contact with the side of the elephant and declares that it is a WALL. God is a Wall; Truth is a Wall. That's the answer, and his followers will fight to the death anyone who can't come to the same conclusion. Another cleric holds the trunk and declares that it is a HOSE. One holds the tail and declares that it is a ROPE. And the others hold onto one of the legs and each declares that it is a TREE - BUT only if one is holding onto the RIGHT Tree -- Their Tree. Everyone else is doomed to Hell.

Here's another image that I conjured up during a Guided Imagery session. I saw a beautiful blindfolded angel with magnificent wings. She has blindly entered a cage that she does not fit into, and she has to droop the shoulders of her wonderful wings to get inside. But this means that the feathers of her wing tips hang out the open doorway, so they must be clipped for her to fit at all. The door is wide open, but she cannot see it. Even if she found the door, her wings have been clipped so she can no longer fly. Eventually she makes herself smaller and smaller in order to be comfortable, but she is still an angel, so she continues to sing, pitiably, softly.

We might come back to her later, but meanwhile, back at the hospital, our heroine has just discovered that she is facing death. My first thought brought poignant tears to my eyes, but not from self-pity. I felt an empathic pain of the grief that my family would experience if I were to die. I knew what I would feel if one of my many siblings were to die. None of us has ever lost a sibling, or a child, or a spouse to death. Our Dad died from the same cancer I had. And our Mom's new husband lost his first wife to the same cancer. So I shared the pain I could imagine them feeling.

My family has always been so worried about my going to Hell if I didn't know Jesus, but it just didn't make sense that the wonderful God I had made contact with would condemn to Hell all the Hindus and Buddhists I lived with for two years in the Himalayas.

As far as my own death, and the fear I might have had about it, I was ready to face it. Sure, I trembled a bit at the idea of dying, but when have I ever gone off on an exciting or scary adventure, like mountain climbing or joining the Peace Corps, without a twinge of fear at the beginning of the journey? I've lived an incredibly full life, been everywhere, done everything (almost) and I have no children or grandchildren to watch grow up. My brothers and sisters are all poor and starving - they would benefit by my leaving them each a bit of money (when I told them this later, they protested lovingly, NO! SPEND IT!) .

Oh, the things that went through my mind during those first hours. The nurses changed their attitude toward me, some becoming more compassionate, others distancing themselves. The doctors thought I was in denial. But I thought of death as just a "winking out" and I would either be at rest, with no more pain, or the great truths of that Elephant would be revealed to me. How exciting! It turns out that I didn't have to wait for the end to have some of that happen.

Meanwhile, I was determined to live life to the fullest, every moment of it, and if my life was going to be a short one, I was going out in a blaze of glory. I bought a new Champagne Gold Subaru with heated seats and automatic everything. If I was going to be an invalid for a while I needed comfort and dependability. I wanted to live my final days in the wonderful home that I had designed and built on the land that I love, and that meant getting in and out my incredible driveway all winter, even if it was the last winter I would spend on this earth.

But the most amazing and unexpected result of the diagnosis was that all the grief and agony of my divorce immediately dropped through a hole at my feet. They just didn't seem to matter any more. My angel's blindfold had loosened and slipped a bit and she found the door. Unfortunately, the feathers of her wings had not yet grown back and it was going to be a very painful molt to grow new ones.

Once again, I called on Pastor Steve, who put me on the Methodist Church prayer list. I mobilized every prayer circle I could find: the Catholics, the Baptists, the Presbyterians. I think most of Arizona and half of California were praying for me. The Quakers were holding me in the light, the Unitarians were lighting candles, and my Subud sisters were holding healing latihan circles around me (more about this later). I went to my naturopath and began every alternative therapy I could find: Pancreatic enzymes, raw organic sheep's liver (eeuw!), Magic Chinese Power Mushrooms, Modified Citrus Pectin, dark green vegetable juices, lots of organic produce, herbs, vitamins, Essiak tea, intravenous Vitamin C, Jin Shin Japanese Energy Therapy, creative visualization, guided imagery, Zeolite, Essential Oils custom-blended by Ed Welch, massage and the laying on of hands (MY FAVORITE), acupuncture, yoga, Music Therapy, prayer, and LOVE - even the life-enhancing thrill of flirting and dancing at the Pub became a healing art.

I have to say something special about the music therapy. My friend Michael let me lie down underneath his grand piano and wrap my arm around the resonating leg of the piano while he played fabulous classical music (mostly by obscure Russian composers, of course).

I laid there and felt the music vibrate through my body until tears squeezed from my eyes. I'm sure there's a Grand Piano Theology somewhere in there, about how some people think the music comes from the piano legs and some say it's from the keyboard and others say," No it's the pianist!"

I think God is the pianist and we are the keyboard. But that's another sermon.

It was around this time I learned that I qualified for a potentially life-saving operation, extremely invasive and risky, one of the largest operations performed at the University of Washington Medical Center. I was told that it could "buy" me another year of life, at least.

In preparation for this, I went to see a very special Subud sister in Bellevue named Hadijah. SUBUD is a contraction of the Indonesian words Susila Budhi Dharma. It is not a separate religion but its practices help anyone make contact with the higher power of their choice. The primary activity for doing this is the latihan, which is an Indonesian word for spiritual exercise. In gender-separated groups we meditate for a short while, and then rise and continue our meditation in movement or vocalization, whatever the spirit moves us to do. Through this activity, my angel had begun to find her voice and sing louder and stronger than ever before.

I have found wonderful peace through this practice, and a deeper understanding of my fundamentalist family members' beliefs when I have made contact with what they would call "The Holy Spirit."

But I'm a Unitarian, not a Trinitarian, and I was holding firmly to that conviction when I met with Hadijah. We began our meditation together in her living room. I felt transcendent. I was in an altered state, halfway to heaven. I surrendered to whatever Almighty God wanted to show me or tell me. I listened.

A presence made itself known to me. And I knew who it was. But to confirm this for me, he said to me, "I am Jesus. I am the Lord." Whoa! Hold everything! I'm a radical, liberal Quaker, Hindu, Unitarian-Universalist and a Low Priestess of Susila Budhi Dharma. What is going on here? All that raced through my mind in a split second.

But my faith in this process was being tested, and I had to know more. I surrendered again and listened, willing to hear whatever was being sent to me. And I heard the most amazing and comforting reply to my inner turmoil. Jesus said, "It's Okay to believe in me, TOO."

WHAM! Suddenly the grip I held on my portion of the Elephant expanded out to embrace the whole world - the whole universe. My spiritual arm lengthened and reached out to touch another part of the Elephant, and I knew! My blindfold had slipped a little more, and I saw what was on the other side. I had NO Fear of going there.

I wanted to shout about it and reassure everyone that I was genuinely happy, to die or to live, as God or the Universe wills it. For me, this is a win-win situation. Because I now have something to live for.

Bernie Siegel talks a lot about "spiritual flat tires", which are instances when things seem to go wrong but in the end they turn out all right, like getting a flat tire on the way to the airport, and you miss a plane that later crashes.

Here's one that I had: My shiny brand new car had barely 200 miles on the odometer as I drove toward Seattle for the surgery, happily singing beautiful music at the top of my lungs. A big truck in the oncoming lane caused a large rock to come crashing into my windshield, cracking it from top to bottom. I could have yelled some expletive (that would have had to be deleted from this sermon anyway), but as I leaned over the steering wheel to assess the damage, I sort of looked up toward heaven and chuckled, "You're testing me, aren't you?"

But the most exciting spiritual flat tire I experienced was one that involved timing. As the doctors had instructed weeks before the operation, my sister was to mobilize my large family network so that someone would be on hand outside the operating room for 12 hours and outside intensive care for the day or two I would be in there. Since I was supposed to check in on Friday the 13th (my lucky day) at around 5 AM for a 7 o'clock operation, my sister and I stayed in a hotel in the University District the night before. Late in the day before the surgery we were informed that the start time had been postponed until about noon, and my sister was in a tizzy trying to rearrange her own and other people's schedules to fit this new time frame.

I, on the other hand, was letting such things just float over me. This was a flat tire on the journey of life, and I was so thrilled to be still having any kind of journey at all that very little could faze me.

On the morning of surgery day, all my distant friends and family and prayer circles didn't know about the time change and thought that my surgery had commenced. Without a clue about what or why it was happening to me, I felt an incredible wave of energy flow through my body. This was not a hot flash -- I know what those feel like. This was like the breath of God. I looked for a clock and then asked my sister what time it was. Just shortly after seven. If I had been under sedation, I would have missed it. I would not have experienced for myself the incredible power of prayer. I was being given a gift, a moment from heaven.

When seemingly bad or bothersome things happen, imagine that the universe may be working on plans for your good or the good of someone else that this inconvenience or misfortune has been a part of. Raging against a reality that's already happened won't make time go backward. We don't have all the answers yet.

I want to tell you a couple of stories about my hospital experience - not the really gross part, -- some of you have already heard way too much about my toilet troubles.

In the pre-op room, I was laughing with two of my brothers when a nurse with a clipboard asked me what religion I was. We joked in unison: "all of them!" On the way to the operating room, I was naively smiling and singing, but later I wondered how ANYONE over the age of 60 could EVER survive the trauma I underwent.

To summarize in one sentence, the surgeons pulled aside my stomach and liver, removed 70% of my pancreas, my entire gall bladder, the common bile duct, 13" of duodenal intestine, and 20 lymph nodes (6 of which were positive for cancer), and then they rebuilt my entire digestive system from scrap parts and put it all back inside me. When I woke up in the recovery room, I was paralyzed from the epidural in my back, and had tubes and hoses coming out of every imaginable and even unimaginable places in my body. They had cut me from here clear down as far as possible, and "possible" didn't like it very much.

After way less than the predicted 12 hours in the operating room, I was doing so well that I was taken directly to the hospital ward, not to intensive care at all. My brothers and their spouses arrived the next morning expecting to be holding a vigil outside, with me on my death bed. Instead I was propped up and joking and laughing with them almost as much as we had while partying a couple of nights before when we had held sort of a "wake" in case I didn't make it.

Oh, by the way, who do you think was the first person to visit me in the hospital who wasn't an immediate family member? Pastor Steve.

The surgeons were astounded at my progress. Their patients are usually older and less flexible and fit than I am, and certainly most are in poorer spirits than I was.

One element of my pre-operative condition that I never expected to be advantageous to me was that I was carrying a little extra weight. I thought that was bad. Okay, so it was closer to 20 pounds, but since pancreatic cancer kills by either metastasizing or by starving you to death, carrying the extra weight kept me from getting too weak and frail until my new digestive system healed. For a long time my tummy and guts were like a newborn baby's -- not sure what to do yet or how to do it.

The biggest peculiar medical challenge I faced in the hospital, besides feeling some anxiety about being so utterly helpless, was that my heart rate and blood pressure are naturally low. I thought that was good. But the heart monitors were difficult to calibrate to prevent alarms going off whenever my heart rate went below 55, so I couldn't get any sleep. My heart rate has been known to get as low as the 30s but that was when I really was in trouble and needed to be wakened ("Miriam, come back.").

Unfortunately, after I experienced severe hallucinations from the pain-killer drugs they were giving me, they told me they had run out of options for pain medication for me because the heavier drugs would lower my blood pressure enough to kill me, so I would just have to endure the pain.

I was half-way to hell for a while, and my sister will testify that I was a paranoid basket case some of that time. I did some heavy soul-searching of the not-so-transcendent type during this period, and I thought about pain and about torture and how it should never be allowed and how I should survive so that I can fight to eliminate all forms of torture from our world.

And I thought about Death: On the day of my death, the blindfold will finally fall from my eyes. I'm not going to add to the anguish in my final moments by denying the reality of it. I'm going to enjoy the thrill of the ride. We all have to go through it some day, some time, anyway. Any one of us could get into an accident or have a heart attack this afternoon, with no chance to say goodbye or pick the music for your funeral or write your own obituary so that the paper gets it right or just live like you want to for once. I just have a little more advance notice than the rest of you might have. And I have been, and intend to continue, taking advantage of that advance notice. You can too. You don't need a terminal diagnosis to start really LIVING!

As I recovered, I thought a lot about Life. One of the gifts my diagnosis brought me was the sudden permission to do anything I wanted to do in the short time I had left. Not surprisingly I didn't want to kill anybody or heap revenge on anyone. I wanted to be happy. And I discovered that my happiness was a gift to others as well as to myself.

Less than two weeks after getting out of the hospital, I returned to continue singing in multiple choirs; at Christmas my sister and I went on a family reunion Caribbean cruise (a gift from our Mom and Step-Dad); and we started planning some serious horseback rides on my sister's horses -- something I've always wanted to do.

And I decided to keep on having spiritual experiences. They can be addictive. It feels like falling in love, swinging on lamp posts and splashing in mud puddles. But with a spiritual experience, at least God loves you back.

I also decided to love some of the people who DIDN'T love me back. That was a stretch at first, but it made me happy and it taught me something about love. When someone you love cannot meet your needs, or return your love in kind, if you can continue to love them anyway, that's what unconditional love is. If you stop loving them because they fail you, that's conditional love. If you let them abuse you in the name of love, then you don't love yourself enough to be happy. And if you make deals with God, that's conditional love, too.

The biggest contradiction to what I presumed I knew about love is this: The best gift you can give to those you love is to be happy. Sounds selfish, doesn't it. Do what you really want to do. Be happy. It's a gift to the whole world if you can commit random acts of senseless kindness -- kindness that is the natural out flowing of a happy person.

Your happiness is contagious, and unfortunately your unhappiness is too. If you are sacrificing for love to the point where you are unhappy, you are not doing your loved ones a service. If you refuse to be happy no matter what or how much your loved one does for you, that's not love either.

Love is happiness.

Bernie Siegel likes to quote Woody Allen, and here is a quote that came up on Bernie's audio tape set about "Healing with Humor," a variation on Laughter is the Best Medicine:

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving: Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must not love or love to suffer, or suffer and die from too much happiness.

When I got my terminal diagnosis, I found out what I was made of. And I discovered I was made of love. I didn't ask "Why me Lord?" I said, "Try me Lord."

God is Love. She wants us to be happy and love each other. Jesus came to me as the embodiment of love. Pastor Steve is the embodiment of love. I am the embodiment of love. Now YOU are all the embodiment of love. There is healing in the hem of every garment in this room because YOU are wearing them.

Your love and caring have helped me heal my life, and it may well save my life too. There's a difference. Your genuine interest and concern for my happiness, my comfort, my welfare, and yes even my spiritual soul's journey, are gifts to me that I return to you willingly, joyously. Along with the nurses at the UW, I was astounded by the volume of cards, the gifts, the flowers, the phone calls, the visits to the hospital, the volunteer hours of wood splitting and beekeeping and house cleaning, the offers and provision of shelter, the chauffeuring, the hugs, and most of all the prayers and the love. Happiness heals. I didn't even get my usual pre-holiday bronchitis this season. I feel great!

I am healed in the giving of love as much as in the receiving of it. Remember, love is happiness, so re-read that to say "I am healed in the giving of my happiness as much as in the receiving of others' happiness."

And in that spirit I wish to share with you a very special happiness. Your love and prayers have healed me medically as well as spiritually. I've been able to control my blood sugar without insulin, and in December I had a clean CT scan. That means my oncologist can't find any more cancer. He says we'll look at it again in 4 months, so technically I'm not "cured" and officially I'm not a "survivor" until I've stayed alive 5 years. The chances of my dying from metastasis within the next two years remain at 95-99%, so, statistically, I'm TOAST. But somebody has to be in that 1-5%. Perhaps it will be me.

Although he offered it, even my oncologist did not recommend chemo or radiation at this point because I am healthy as a horse. That means I probably won't have to lose my hair (oh vanity) or my fingernails or my bones or my brain cells to the poisons of modern medicine. Unfortunately, medical insurance pays for that stuff, but doesn't pay much for the alternative therapies I am using. So I plan to mortgage my house (which is a life-affirming place) and to live there as long as I am able; that is IF I can keep my house and get a mortgage, all of which might not be decided until the trial in April.

The irony of getting well and staying well for a long, LONG time is that I could slip back into being tightly blindfolded like everybody else, fall victim to the stress and anxiety of the divorce, and return to denial about the inevitability of my eventual death, and forget the preciousness of every moment. Also, I might miss all the love and attention that my disease has brought me. But wait a minute, why should I miss it? I don't need a disease in order to get my needs met, and you don't either. I intend to give love and attention, and I will probably get my share back, multifold.

I used the concepts from Siegel's book Love, Medicine & Miracles to help me heal my life. I have hope because I know where this cancer came from, and so I can send it back.

God answers prayers, and sometimes the answer is " NO." So even if the hope and the prayers and the love don't heal my body, if I die from this cancer, don't throw the book out and sneer with skepticism, "All that love stuff is a bunch of quackery; it didn't work!" Because it already has worked. The days that I experienced since my diagnosis, and whatever days I have left, have been and will be precious gems, every moment.

Let us all be grateful for the life we have now, and never fear the life that is to come.

[end of sermon]

Meditation: 3 minutes
Special Music: "I Have Been Given One Moment From Heaven" by Enya.