Author: Jon

A Jon Post

The more I think about and hope to become more skilled at reflecting Christ to the sick and the dying the clearer it becomes that, despite the simplicity of the gospel, there is no simplicity in the practice it demands.

What is the good news to the 17-year-old boy living in my home whose lymphoma protrudes from his chest, his arm pit, his neck, and his ribs? What is the good news to the 43-year-old widow who lives in the liminal space between living and dying, unable to know if her cancer is growing as she does radiation therapy or receding? There are 14 men and women living in my home. Nearly all of them are unsure if they inhabit the land of the living or the land of the dying.

Please imagine that with me.

They sincerely do not know if the cancer detected in their bodies is responding to the poison dripped into their veins. The do not know if the speed-of-light radioactive particles ripping cell membranes and dignity to shreds is doing the same to their cancer, giving way to more living or simply prolonging an already prolonged dying.

So we wait in the unrestful place of helplessness.

Social workers and developmental experts like to talk and write about something they call “learned helplessness”. This is the idea that, after prolonged experiences of shock, pain, and betrayal, people and animals learn that “nothing they do matters”; there is no act, real or imagined, that could provide an escape from that shock, pain, or betrayal. Surprisingly enough, only within the past few years have researchers discovered that the original theory of “learned helplessness” was precisely backwards; that is, passivity in response to shock is the default, and that we learn that we can escape from that shock or pain. We learn control, we learn that we have power, we learn that escape may depend on our own responses and actions (if you are interested in this, there is a very neat article here about it). I’ve realized that it has become important that I unlearn helpfulness in many of the ways I serve at Casa Ahavá.

I mention the above because it seems important to me to enter deeply the spiritual reality (my paragraph about Christ and the gospel), the soul/psychological reality (the above paragraph about learned helplessness), and now I’d like to enter with you into the corporeal reality (our bodies, our dust, our fingerprints).

So why helplessness? Well, as I mentioned above, our psyche seems to begin with the assumption that we are helpless. With all of our modern medical advances (at least in North America and in Europe), it turns out our bodies still die. No matter how much we internalize the idea that we are not helpless, no one has yet found a way not to die. We can try and try to learn that we are not helpless, yet there comes a door through which we all pass on our way into our dying.

That door is helplessness. No act, real or imagined, will keep us from the land of the dying.

In Casa Ahavá, in our world of the sick and the dying I ask you to please imagine with me the helplessness of not knowing whether you are living or you are dying. Perhaps you, dear reader, have had cancer or have walked alongside someone who has. Maybe it was Krohn’s disease. Maybe it was HIV/AIDS. Maybe it was Parkinson’s. Maybe it was Alzheimer’s. If you have walked the paths of those dark forests, you may have come across this painful realization: You were taught a lie. You were taught that helplessness is wrong and that there is always an escape. You learned helpfulness. In an age of power and control, someone has tried to convince us that they can be delivered into our own hands.  

Is this important to you, dear reader? Is this stuff ok? I truly don’t want to bore you with this but it has felt more and more urgent for me to know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings (back to the spiritual reality, right?) and this seems like an important pathway through that dark and confusing forest.

So what connects helplessness to the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings? I’d like to quote just a few verses of Scripture here, if you will be so kind as to bear with me:

He was oppressed and afflicted,

    yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

    so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

    Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

    for the transgression of my people he was punished

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

    and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

    nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer

Isaiah 53:7-10

Does that sound like helplessness to you? It does to me. The man to whom this prophecy refers had all power and authority laid before his feet… and he chose helplessness. He chose to be led away, silent, without protest, crushed, and suffering.

Yesterday I had a long conversation with a 23-year-old boy dying with cancer with a large open wound which has taken away his ability to walk. The cancer has robbed him of his dignity, his privacy, and his strength. And I can give none of that back to him. No action of his or my own, real or imagined, can provide escape from his affliction.

Today I looked a 17-year-old in the eyes as he showed me another painful lump protruding from his flesh and I could not tell if the mass under his skin was greater or smaller than the fear in his face.

For you see, I have no power here. I am helpless.

A wise man recently told me that the whole arc of the Passion narrative bends toward helplessness. Who then am I to seek power and control (helpfulness) when Christ gave those up?

To those of you reading this who pray with us, partner with us, are participants in this broken-to-be-given project that is Casa Ahavá, I say this: The blessing of serving in Mozambique is to become more comfortable with the spiritual reality of helplessness. So: here we are; send us.

A Jon Post

Grief is not a disease from which I recover, it is not something that I hope has a cure, it is nothing to which I will ever seek a vaccine.

This week Lurde died at home with her family. She lived in mine and with mine for a full year and we grew to know much of what was beautiful and much of what was not in her.

Just like a family should.

Lurde loved deeply at times, selfishly at times, lazily at times, and lavishly at times. She ate too much and laughed more than her fair share. She didn’t clean up after herself much and she always ensured that I knew that she cared about how my family and I were feeling. She went out of her way to ask how rested we felt each day.

Now she is gone. Now we grieve.

I’ve learned something in the eleven years I’ve been privileged to spend with the sick and dying in Mozambique: Grief itself can be a ritual.

No, I do not mean grief rituals; things like funerals, wakes, gathering in remembrance, nightly prayers, etc. I mean grieving on purpose as a ritual.

I wake up each morning and sit in the still of the darkness before the sunrise. I practice breathing, I practice praying, and I practice grieving, then I come inside and have a cup of coffee.

Breath, prayer, grief, coffee. These are my morning rituals. I do not pretend that they are the best morning rituals nor that I am any good at them but they seem to do their job of keeping in in touch with the my Father, with the living, and with the dead.

I stay connected to Lurde, to Luisa, to Mariana, to Loice, to Torres, to Manejo, to Teresa, to Justino, to Maeza, to Augusto… the ones I love and grieve from this last year. There are many more names on that list from the years prior. If I do not make my grief my own, I think my grief would own me.

So I practice a simple ritual. I breathe. I pray. I grieve. And I have a cup of coffee.  

P.S.

It feels remiss to post this without mentioning the state of the world and this virus. I can’t help but notice how I feel that much of the reaction I see en masse among those I know and those I don’t bears a striking resemblance to grief.

Questions like, “what if we had locked down sooner?” “What if we had closed this border or that?” “What if it’s not that bad?” “What if this is all for nothing?” “What if someone else was leading?”

All seem so similar to questions like, “What if he hadn’t gotten in the car that day?” “What if she hadn’t smoked for all those years?” “What if we had gotten a screening for the disease sooner?” “What if I had just called her and told her how I felt?” “What if things had been different . . . would he/she/they still be dead?”

These are not questions that lead to answers and, it seems to me, they are questions spurred by grieving without knowing it. Oh, how I wish we could learn to see and know our grief.  

One time, a man looking at his own coming death, called his closest loved ones and asked them to join him in a garden. “Stay here and keep watch with me” he said and fell on his face on the ground and grieved before a Holy Father. I like to think of that man as the one in whose steps I am trying to walk. Maybe at least I can stay here and keep watch over the dying and grieve with them when they ask it of me.

A Jon Post

It has been 45 days since I’ve lived with the dying. 45 days ago I drove away from the dying and entered once again the homes and communities of the living.

While it’s been comfortable, joyful, loving, and restful to be with the living, I still miss the dying.

I have spent 45 days thinking and praying over the dying I left there. My friend and brother Torres, whose lymphoma darkens his veins and thoughts but not his spirit. My daughter and precious Loice, whose advancing breast cancer throws its tendrils from corner to corner of her tired and young body while she hopes for more time with her young children. My sister and cherished Mariana, whose metastatic breast cancer sears her with pain and weariness while she boldly looks at the difficulty of her coming days. Rosa, Eugênio, Armîndo, Joana, Custódio, and so many others dying or with whom I witnessed death…

All of them left the land of the living and welcomed me into theirs.

I’ve come to revere and love the company of the dying. I’ve come to appreciate that, though most of us would rather not, we will all be a part of adding to it one day.

 Most of us are afraid of that day. Most of us are afraid of being one of the dying.

Why is that? Why are we so afraid of dying?

When I say dying I do not mean the moment your heart stops, when brain activity ceases, when cardio-pulmonary activity has not been detected for however many minutes the doctor in the room deems necessary to declare a time.

I mean dying as an active verb. I mean dying instead of living. No one I have ever met has been afraid of being one of the living. Not that I’ve known of, anyway. Nearly everyone I’ve met, however, is afraid of being one of the dying. We are afraid of that time, be it years or days, in which we go from living our lives to dying our deaths. In fact, I believe most of us pursue every medical option possible, no matter how painful, how detrimental to relationship, no matter how much it ruins our ability to be wise, caring, loving or faithful, in order to stay in the land of the living.

Maybe, and I’m not sure on this, but maybe there comes a time for each of us where entering the land of the dying is the wisest, most loving, and most faithful thing we can do.

Christ seemed to think so.

His last week before his death seems to have been in the land of the dying, no matter how much his friends and disciples wanted him to remain in the land of the living. Maybe even more than a week. When he knew his death was coming, he spoke freely and often to his friends and disciples about it. He prepared them for it and, in the context of the coming of His own suffering and death, prepared them for theirs.

Through shortness of breath I have heard deep truths and seen profound wisdom. Through the lips and hands of the dying, I have begun to understand how to prepare for my own. By the example and encouragement of the dying, I have learned a deeper peace in Christ than I have ever known.

If you know someone who is dying, do not go to them in pity or thinking that you offer some great sacrifice by visiting them or seeing them. Go to the dying and try to learn from them what Christ tried to teach his disciples. Try to learn how to suffer well. Try to learn how to hope for home. Try to learn and be sustained by the dying, rather than offer sustenance or gifts of your own.

If you are one of the dying, know that I love you and wish I could learn from you. Please take this time that you are dying, the only one you’ll ever have, and teach it to those of us who are not in it yet. Help sustain the rest of us, who badly need sustenance, with your wisdom given to you in your dying. Please show us how to transition from living your life to dying your death and doing that in a way that knows Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings.