Being with the Dying Anderson

Being with the Dying

“Being witness to a death is a profound experience for everyone-for family members and loved ones and for health care professionals who have cared for the patient-and certainly for the person who ministers spiritually. When you have sat vigil with a dying soul, you are forever changed. You have experienced a great mystery.” Megory Anderson, Attending the Dying

Megory Anderson has written a large volume on being with the dying as well as a short pocket-sized handbook. Many people come for spiritual direction related to a death. Someone significant has died or is about to die. Often the death is very imminent. If there is time I go over some of the very concrete directions Megory Anderson gives and then gift them the small handbook. My experience is that often there is not even time for them to digest the handbook which can be so very helpful. Frequently the person or caregiver is so overwhelmed that even reading is difficult. It is similar to my experience with hospice. My father-in-law was put on hospice care the day before he died. We so often wait too long before asking for help or accepting the reality of the situation.

Anderson teaches us so much. Attending the dying is like the privilege of being at a birthing. It is a sometimes-painful celebration of a new life. I especially try to reread her section about creating a sacred space. We talk to the family about clearing clutter from the room, bringing in sacred objects such as devotional icons, prayer beads, photographs, maybe even childhood books, reading favorite stories, even childhood poems. Favorite music, a lighted candle, a favorite quilt, fresh flowers from someone’s garden remind us all that something special is happening here. We come to be with the person dying, listen to them and hear their story.  Conversations should be directed to them.  My experience is always to speak to the dying as if they can hear what we say. As the death approaches, I know of many who midwife their loved one into a new life by singing favorite hymns, reading the psalms, taking turns saying prayers, and performing rituals for the dying from their traditions. After the death, saying prayers and preparing the body can be one last loving ritual for family and special friends. My father-in-law grew magnificent roses. The night he died, our family took rose petals from the flowers in his room and scattered them over his body before walking his body out to the funeral hearse.

Joanna          joannaseibert.com

Responding to Mystery Norris

   Responding to Mystery Norris

"Mary proceeds—as we must do in life—making her commitment without knowing much about what it will entail or where it will lead. I treasure the story because it forces me to ask: When the mystery of God’s love breaks through into my consciousness, do I run from it? Do I ask of it what it cannot answer? Shrugging, do I retreat into facile cliches, the popular but false wisdom of what 'we all know'? Or am I virgin enough to respond from my deepest, truest self, and say something new, a 'yes' that will change me forever?"

Kathleen Norris,  Amazing Grace

annunciation Fra AngelicoConvent of San Marco Florence

The heart of spiritual direction and the spiritual life indeed is responding to mystery, and certainly Mary is our icon for responding to something that is a mystery to her and all of us to this day. First of all, we must be open to the presence of a call to mystery. I have always wondered about all the young women that Gabriel visited who said, “Let me think about it,” “Come back later,” “This is really not a good time for me to do this,” “No, definitely, not!”  “You must be kidding!”

There is no question that our answers to the mystery will change us and our life forever. My experience is that we can learn to respond to the mystery first in small ways so that when a larger call to the mystery comes, we are ready. This is the practice of awareness and openness. We must also be open to going off or at least temporarily abandoning our agenda and listening to the interruptions in our life. The mystery is all around us, in every wakening moment, in Nature and in young children, in older adults,  often in those in need and poverty, and especially in our interruptions.

Taking time to be in silence or with others in need or being outdoors each day can expose us to the mystery of a world greater than ourselves. Spending time with young children can connect us to joy and love without conditions. Some of the most spiritual people I know are older men and women who know better than any of us how little control we have in our lives and have accepted it and made peace with it. The people I sit with who come to our food pantry often talk about how blessed their lives are. They see blessings in every offering.

“Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) could be one of our best mantras.

Joanna   joannaseibert.com

Thomas Merton and spiritual direction

Thomas Merton and spiritual direction

“The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.”

Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayers

Thomas Merton’s concise book, Spiritual Direction and Meditation, is excellent for someone to read who wants to know what spiritual direction is all about and is recommended to spiritual friends before meeting about direction for the first time. It should also be a frequent reread for those giving spiritual direction.  Merton reminds us that spiritual direction is not psychotherapy, and that directors should not become amateur therapist. He recommends that directors not concern themselves with unconscious drives and emotional problems. They should refer.

Merton’s sections on meditations are classic,  straight forward, and practical. He uses the story of the Prodigal Son to serve as a model for meditation, as the son “entered into himself”, meditated on his condition starving in a distant land, far from his father. Merton suggests the Incarnation, the birth of God into human form, as a meditation where we relate to the birth events within our own spiritual life.  Merton emphasizes the importance of holy leisure, believing that meditation should not be work, remembering that it will take time. He reminds us of promising artists who have been ruined by a premature success, which drove them to overwork in order to renew again and again the image of themselves created in the public mind. An artist who is wise thinks more than he paints and a poet who respects his art burns more than he publishes. So, in the interior life we must allow intervals of silent transitions in our prayer life.  Merton reminds us of the words of St. Theresa, “God has no need of our works. God has need of our love.” The aim of our prayer life is to awaken the Holy Spirit within us so that the Holy Spirit will speak and pray within us. Merton believes that in contemplative prayer we learn about God by love rather than knowledge and this awaking is brought on not by the actions of ourselves but by the work of the Holy Spirit.  Merton cautions us about what he calls informal or colloquial “comic book spirituality” where Mary becomes Mom and Joseph is Dad and we “just tell them all about ourselves all day long” which flourishes in popular religion literature. This may be a path to God for some, but it was not Merton’s path.

Joanna    joannaseibert.com