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We
may never pass this way again …
Jeannie
Wylie-Kellermann
I had the misfortune
to finish high school just as this song peaked in its popularity
in my small Michigan town. At an all-school assembly, it was
announced as our class' song and I fled. A friend tagged along.
She knew that my father had just died - in New York City
in 1974. I was glad for the company but also frustrated that
she seemed self-absorbed, "I've never been this close to death
before ... ."
 "Yeah,
well, get a grip," I wanted to yell. Or, had I known it then,
I could have quoted Julie Wortman's favorite Emerson line, "Life
is real; life is earnest."
So now I'm about
to turn 43 and have a high-grade cancer in my brain. I spent
the whole last year struggling to digest the news that the seizures
I had Labor Day weekend in 1998 were caused by an anaplastic
glioblastoma. I fought believing that it was actually cancer
until there was no other conclusion. Until that moment, I kept
thinking, "Unhuh, I won't join that club 'til I have to. I'm
not the cancer-personality type!"
Since then my
partner Bill and I have read more than anyone wants to know
about the theories on cancer, the composition of cancer, the
treatments for cancer. I was quickly overwhelmed - even
on the lack of agreement about what cancer is. And then there
is lots of literature on how to develop the right attitude,
how to grip something in this world so strongly, that dying
is not an option. Some people refuse to die because they have
kids to raise. One farmer-type said, "Nope, I got to get home
to my garden." Doubtless some people live for their pets or
the view or their neighbors. Perhaps they simply want to praise
God in some particular way.
Recently I was
sitting at my kitchen table talking with my 13-year-old. It's
easy to forget that she's 13. She is extremely attentive and
has always had a mind like a 35-year-old. She's good on details
and usually right. It's hard when parenting her to try to recall
that she is a child and needs to be protected like a child.
So, there I was,
having an insight and she was my companion. I said to my own
kid, "You know, I've been thinking about time. While it matters
whether I die at 42 or at 82, in many ways it doesn't matter
at all."
Ever so gently,
testing what I could bear, she said, "Mom, do you want to hear
some reasons why it does matter?"
As it crashed
in on me that I was having this conversation with the very last
person in the world who should hear my philosophizing, I nodded.
She told me that if I live to be 82, I would meet our grandchildren
(should the girls choose to have any). I would have time to
walk in the woods.
She tailored
the list to the things I love, with a strong but gentle bias
toward my being there as our kids grow up. At the same time,
she managed not to put pressure on me. She was artful -
as usual. It's challenging parenting a child who is often older
than you. (Lydia does have her faults, not to worry. And meanwhile
Lucy is a bundle of joy and challenges of a different type.
Lucy is much less likely to tell you what's on her mind. You
have to notice. And she'll notice you notice! Both girls are
smart and loving in radically different ways.)
But, despite
my regrets for announcing my great insight about death and time
to my oldest child, the thoughts remain true.
Daniel Corrigan
preached at my Dad's installation as rector at the Church of
the Advent in Boston in 1960. I've heard that he leaned forward
with a twinkle in his eyes and said, "Sam Wylie is my best friend
- and I don't care if he lives or dies!"
It's the great
tension of our faith. What is it we are about? Are we living
or dying? Does it matter?
Knowing some
of the stats on cancer, I look around rooms now and wonder.
If it's one out of three, who else shares this ailment? How
can we help each other? What worldly things need to change?
Which factories close? Which pollutants get screened out of
smoke? How can we learn to walk in beauty and trust, while also
fighting back? To model what it means to be an elder, yet also
be effective at bringing change? And most of all, how can we
praise God without ceasing in this time-bound world?
It
is perhaps no coincidence, that William Stringfellow began
to brood theologically
about the matter of time as he faced the exigencies of life-threatening
illness and the approach in 1968 of radical surgery. When,
providentially and against all expectation, he awoke from
the operation, he had been rendered a complete diabetic,
thoroughly dependent on an elaborate regimen for day-to-day
survival, a strict timetable of multiple mealtimes and insulin
injections.
"The
peril of death is concealed in the issue of whether a
person with such health necessities is so obedient to
time as to become enslaved to it, allowing the whole of
existence to be regimented," he wrote. "Such a person
... becomes a chronic victim and morally dies. Then the
very procedures commendable for sustaining life become
radically dehumanizing and the actual state of the person
is the moral equivalent of death."
Some
years latter, at a public forum in Michigan, a friend
of mine asked Stringfellow to identify some marks of resurrection.
The questioner was astonished when the first thing Stringfellow
named was "freedom from bondage to time." He mentioned
the ailments and his refusal to be dominated or tyrannized
by the strict regime, however necessary. He also mentioned
the monastic rhythm and freedom of his homelife with Anthony
Towne on Block Island, to which he'd moved following surgery,
for healing and recuperation. As he wrote:
"There
is little idolatry of time on the Island. In fact, the
prevailing spirit of the community is somewhat contemptuous
of time, having more a sense of history than destiny,
and the style of life there implicitly ridicules the ethics
of mainland society which makes people slaves of time."
Many
recipients of his and Anthony's hospitality over the years
there, will attest to its healing character, the easy
respite from the time-driven realm. They called their
home "Eschaton" – the end of time.
Stringfellow
expected that end imminently. In his view, the consciousness
of imminence was normative in the biblical witness and
the earliest Christian community. Admittedly, the notions
of destroying death and the abolishing of time so tax
language and thought as to push temporal categories beyond
the capability of human vocabulary. Hence Scripture speaks,
he said, "in marvelously versatile and appropriately diverse
ways of the Second Advent: prophetically, metaphorically,
parablolically, ecstatically, sacramentally, dogmatically,
poetically, narratively – in every tongue or style
or syntax or idiom available."
As
far as Stringfellow was concerned, to expect the end at
any moment, to hope for it, and to live in its anticipation
implied a biblical ethic and politics. Or at least a radical
freedom from which to improvise the other two.
In
fact, it was to the loss and confusion of this consciousness
that Stringfellow attributed the church's dependency upon
political principalities and other institutions of power.
In time it was a quick descent into ecclesiastical anxieties
about survival, into elaborate false hopes and Constantinian
arrangements, into collaboration and complicity with empire,
into reliance on Death itself.
Conversely,
living in the imminence of the Eschaton, living in freedom
from bondage to time or necessity or any form of death,
"That is the only way, for the time being, to live humanly."
--Bill
Wylie-Kellermann
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