Author: Jon

A Jon Post

It’s an important day in my faith tradition. All the pageantry and performance of the day coalesce into sunrise services, liturgical dances, ecstatic praises, and reprises of Keith Green singing “Hear the Bells Ringing”.

But here I sit on one of the many plastic chairs that line the school gymnasium that passes for a church building on Sunday mornings in Maputo, and I’m thinking about my church clothes.

Pristine, they hang in my closet most days smelling of detergent or dust, depending on how long it has been since I’ve felt the need to dress up. Today, my pink button-up shirt and dress-up jeans won the day, and I joined in the Easter custom of wearing bright colors and new-life-spring-has-sprung-themed clothing on a day welcomed by Christians around the globe as our most momentous and worthy of celebration. But my church clothes have a particular smell to them that keeps distracting me from the joyous occasion.

I spent the morning carrying a 19-year-old boy from bed to shower, from shower to chair, and from chair to wheel-chair. He has lost all strength or control of his legs as lymphoma has claimed nerve ending upon nerve ending throughout his body as its own. Lymphoma has spread twisted versions of white-blood cells into blood stream and body, pushing aside the bits and pieces that used to respond to the will of the person who used to call them his own. His legs and one arm no longer respond to his bidding and so I carry him from place to place in their stead.

He is dying.

I smell it on my church clothes.

I smell it on my shoulder where he laid his head as I picked him up from his bed and carried him to the shower chair, where he washed away the work he did in the night of staying alive and breathing. I smell it on my right forearm where his knees draped as I carried him back to a plastic chair to dry his frail body. I smell it on my hands where I picked up one limp foot then another, shucking jeans that used to be the right size but are now far too big, up his legs and to his waist. I smell it on my chest where he leaned as I put him in my car. I smell it on my beard where his head lay as I pulled him back out and put him in our wheelchair.

The angels of death and age walk hand in hand, smiling as they go. Though often thought of as malicious, they mean no more ill than did Jacob’s angel, and they too can be wrestled with for the sake of a blessing. When a 19-year-old wrestles with his angel of death, that angel’s close friendship with the angel of age means both tend to smell the same. If you have ever accompanied one of your own very old ones, you likely know the smell. So too, our dying bear that smell. It has taken me several years of wrestling to get used to the smell but I no longer resent it as I once did. It smells like our old ones. It smells like our ancestors. It even smells like a tomb. And I smell it on my pink-spring-has-sprung, button-up shirt.

This day, most Christians focus on the story told in the Gospel narratives of an empty tomb, and a resurrection and the hope of salvation.

But not all.

For some, the hope, the joy, the celebration, the liturgy of “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!” is as painful as the tumors and malignancies in body and soul that accompanied them to that pew, cushion, or plastic chair. For some, the tears fall today as easily as the smiles comes to the rest of the church. For some, all promise of “for those who believe” is only another pronouncement of the brokenness of the body and the pouring of the blood to go along with the brokenness of the promises and hopes for healing. No testimony, nor truth-telling, nor tithing could bring the miracle once so desperately hoped for and believed in and now that brokenness sits in the pew, the cushion, the plastic chair, or, as in our case, the wheel-chair.

Some of us are as perplexed as were John and Peter when they found grave clothes where they expected their friend. Some of us still smell like them.

That’s what today means to some of us. Hear me in this, beloved: It is the right day for that.

If you go today to your pew, your cushion, or your plastic chair and you listen closely and sniff the air around those who may have wrestled in the night, do me this favor: Echo the words of that one who is risen and say “Come unto me, all who are labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Then follow it up with a simple, “Eat and drink with us, you are no freak and we are not freaked out by your suffering”

A Jon Post

Death came calling.
Who does not know the rasp of reeds?
A twilight whisper in the leaves before
The great araba falls

-Wole Soyinka Death and the King’s Horsemen

Ah, yes… these halls, these steps, this awkwardly steep ramp and stairs. I know them all. I know the patterns made by footfall and old stretcher wheels, each in equal measure, tired, yet determined to bear burdens to destinations.

Ah, yes… this weight on my shoulder, the knees draped over my arm, the smell of necrosis left on my shirt after a head rested there. I know them all and I know the trust and the vulnerability extended in short uneven breaths.

Ah, yes… the drumbeats of the work and the dance rhythms of the desperately ill. I recognize them all and I recognize the weariness shared in them too. We pound the animal skin of the drum together, you and I. We raise and stamp our feet in unison, you and I, and we dance our way into the chemotherapy laden halls of the oncology ward and the constant beep of the heart-rate monitors of the ER. Oh, Aventina and Ussene, we dance our way through this broken land of medicine and mystery hoping for a smile and a few moments rest.

Ah, yes… the wait. The wait. Will antibiotic and transfused hematocrit and a ritual prayer sang over it all bring the miracle? The wait. Will paracetamol infusions and x-rays really do what a chanted “Father, please… not yet” won’t do?  The wait.

Ah, yes… the drive home in an empty car. Tomorrow the news will be better. Tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep with a badly placed IV line in your arm and a new dawn, we will dance again. We will dance back down those stairs and back through the hallways back to my car and to my home. It is only tonight that my car is empty, it is only tonight, beloved. Tomorrow we dance again.

Ah, yes… the drumbeats again. The drumbeats of my heart and my breath as I wonder if I should have just stayed. The drumbeats of your heart and breath, too. They slow, beloved. They slow. Mine too. Mine too.

Ah, yes… the next-day-hallways and the dance of the white clad professionals making way for death and the dance, holding up stop signs to interloper and intercessor. Sunlight and disinfectant vie for prominence in the broken tile below our feet where wheelchairs bring their wards. Where are you, beloved? Where do you beat the drum of your heart and your family and your people?

Ah, yes… the wince of the white-coat-wearer, the furtive glance to the side trying to assess how important this question is to me and how much time is needed to answer it. Where is my beloved?

Ah, yes… the dance of the daughter’s tears and the accusation in the wailing… “I worked so hard for her… I worked so hard” she beats the words unto the drum’s animal skin and shell, and she dances to the loss of our beloved. She is dead, she is dead, she is dead, she is dead, she is dead.

Ah yes… the tears of the older brother who holds my hand in his and wonders over and over and over how he deteriorated so fast, how tumor and flesh and grey matter fused to create confusion and sleep and nausea. He is dead, he is dead, he is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

Oh, Ussene and Aventina, oh beloved aunty and uncle, we wail and dance and perform our grief on the dirt-patch of our souls and of our backyard. We walk in the footsteps of the one who offered His own body broken for us, his blood poured out for us. We too, offer our brokenness to you… take and eat. Take and drink of our blood and our grief and dance your way through the stars to the drum beats of your people into the arms of the one who first offered you food from His brokenness.

A Jon Post

Months away from writing and from Casa Ahava have made me feel rusty at both. Bear with me as I ramble here and re-introduce body and soul to the practices, please.

In November of last year my family made our once-every-2-or-3-year pilgrimage across the Atlantic Ocean to the North American continent in an attempt to connect and re-connect to those we love and who love us and our work here. Unsurprisingly, and in a familiar repetition of pilgrimages past, the weariness of time away from home seemed to be the order of the day and, though all the love and connection we could have hoped for was found in America, our tired feet still found their rest once the African red and brown soil of our home garden squeezed back between our toes after a rainfall in January.

It is good to be home.

Body and soul, it is good to be home.

Body and soul. I was raised in a faith tradition that made clear the distinction between those two things, the one more valuable and worthy of focus than the other. Before I was even aware of it, my work over these last 15 years started giving me reason to doubt any division between the two was as clean as I had believed all those early years.

When a 19-year-old Naldo comes back after two years to Casa Ahava with waves lymphoma washing through his chest and back like a tide of brackish water, body and soul are not so distinct. An entire boy is sick and frightened.

When a 60-year-old Aventina comes to Casa Ahava for the first time with a single change of clothes and a painful tumor pushing against her head, her eye, and her ear, it is not so clear that it is not pushing against her soul as well.

Three others are here at Casa Ahava too, body and soul, not so dual. We have plenty of space for more and I go to the hospital daily to see where shines the brightest suffering in need of communion and family. I’ve come to realize that to share the communion is to share the suffering and there is no wrongness in that. My own body and soul give testimony to the sharing of it all and whether the merging of the two fail or fly is not up to me anymore.

What I sang in my childhood in the hymn rings out now in the practice of communion with the soul and body breakages of my patients:

Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow

I am no doctor to body nor soul, and I have no special power to bring healing to a person. I may in fact be the leper and I may in fact have the heaviness of a heart of stone. I certainly may live with many of each here at Casa Ahava.
All to Him I owe. Body and soul. All to Him I owe.