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End of Life Matters – Spirituality

Downtown Presbyterian Church Forum, 1/14/2018

January 14, 9:50 – Spirituality

“Spirituality” is difficult to define and rarely discussed yet it can provide a sense of connection to something greater and more lasting than the physical aspects of self. Is there meaning to existence? What does that require of us? We will listen to our differing answers.

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Welcome, and thank you for coming to this discussion. The fact that you are here indicates that you already have some respect and curiosity about the nature of Spirituality. We don’t have many opportunities to take the time or find a community to discuss these issues.

Before we start on this week’s work, I want to provide an overview of what I am trying to accomplish these several Sundays.

This week, I want to re-introduce the idea of Spirituality as an important dimension of our personhood. Spirituality – whether it is examined or unexamined, articulated or not – provides structure and purpose to our thoughts and actions. It provides explanations and coherence to our activities, and can be a sense of connection to something greater and more lasting than the physical aspects of self. Many different spiritualities exist: from religious to humanistic to nihilistic.  Is there meaning to existence? What does that require of us? This week we can reflect on some of the sources of meaning for us.

Next week, I want to make us uncomfortable by confronting the idea of Suffering. Ill-health will challenge our explanations and connections to Something Else – will one’s spirituality provide comfort and support to face the sorrows that accompany illness, accident and aging? If suffering is universal (it is), then it must form part of our common humanity. The ends of lives raise spiritual questions – questions of transience and connectedness, and the character of our time together. How do we acknowledge and respond to the suffering within ourselves and within the Other? The ends of lives bring these questions to the forefront.

By the third week, I hope we will have engaged with each other enough to recognize how different our approaches can be. Despite those differences, we will touch on the debate of medically assisting suicide. I will say now – I am very uncomfortable entrusting my licensed colleagues to decide which patients’ lives could be ended with physicians’ assistance. The debate about medical assistance to suicide involves more than choice and laws. Once physical suffering is alleviated (and it’s a substantial challenge in some cases), should the state empower physicians to assist in ending a life before its natural time? The escalating debate involves many dimensions of personhood – especially the spiritual.

Finally, in the fourth week, we will try to wrap up by re-assessing how awareness of the end of life (the idea of Death) can inform our spirituality before then. How can realization of eventual mortality, sorrow and loss inform how we live? How do we relate to something lasting beyond ourselves? Trying to answer such questions can help us live better connected to ourselves and to each other.

This last conversation can move us from the abstract to the personal, from hearing others’ ideas to hearing our own. In particular, does this conversation help us to embrace and invigorate our Christian spirituality? The Christmas story, Rev. Pat reminded us last week, meant God said “I love you” to the world; and St. Paul said that nothing can separate us from that love. Is awareness of a loving God enough to give us the courage to live our “one wild and precious life”?

Each week I will make some comments, but I want very much to let the wisdom of the group speak also. For this week and next, I have readings that I hope will focus attention and feeling on the subject matter. I will describe later how I imagine the process could go.

Spirituality. Let me start by trying to define or at least describe what I mean by this. I use the term “spirituality” to refer to that part of our personhood (or mind) that provides meaning, identity and connection to our lives. (repeat)

It is one of my themes that spirituality informs how we live and what we do. We all have a sense of connectedness to something beyond ourselves. A problem in our lives and times is that we rarely have any opportunity to discuss the nature or foundations of our beliefs. As a result some or many of our beliefs are unexamined (Sunday school ideas) without application of our adult powers of memory, reason, reflection, imagination and choice. Furthermore, we have to be able to stop ourselves from imagining my solution should also be your solution. The 1.2 million volumes in the Union library tell us that this subject has no definitive answer.

Still … not having a definitive answer does not mean that there can be no answer. Rather, not having one answer means that there must have been important questions that have prompted so many attempts at answering. Many spiritualities exist.

I believe that as we discuss, we will find that our sources of meaning and purpose are different. I approach things intellectually, and tend to make categories, use logic and read books. Others use their feelings, bodily movements, music or ritual to place themselves in closer proximity to Something Else.

For some the Something Else may feel like something out there, and for others it might feel more like something in here. Generally there is an appreciation of Something Else – something bigger, or more lasting, or more powerful. It often is experienced as something that words cannot express – ineffable. Certainly religions are traditions with myths, words, beliefs and rituals that systematize their sense of awe and wonder. But the spirituality of a person is the lived experience for that person: spirituality, it is said, is what one sets one’s heart on.

Let’s try to get at these concepts differently. As I said, I tend to get intellectual and thus try to explain too much. Let’s engage (and we are all novices here) in the process of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Jesuits.

One of my courses at Union Theological Seminary was on this Jesuit practice. Our teacher (Roger Haight) was a Jesuit priest who was adapting the Exercises to help spiritual seekers appreciate Christian spirituality. My pale efforts will be to remind us that spiritual orientation takes effort, discipline, patience and practice. Roger Haight, I should explain, was teaching at a liberal Protestant seminary (Union), because the Catholic church had barred him in 2009 from teaching Catholic theology due to a book he wrote in 1999.

I am introducing this exercise because it is a means of bringing attention to bear on a spiritual subject. It is a spiritual exercise, because the intent is to develop a better sense of how one relates to God or one’s conception of God. For Ignatius, God is the ultimate source and purpose of living – and that is spirituality: how do we relate to the Ultimate?

Each Exercise begins with the preparatory prayer. This reminds us why we are here: “Ask God for the grace that all our intentions, actions and operations may be ordered purely for the service and praise of the Divine Majesty.”

We will then bring our focus to this essay by William Faulkner – it is his Nobel acceptance speech of 1950. I have known this essay for a long time, and it has always moved me by its rhythms and inspiration. I believe it speaks about the impact of spirit, or not having it, without explicitly addressing spirituality.

We will try to apply Ignatian methods. Imagine the scene in which it occurs. Ask God for what you hope to gain from the exercise. Let me propose these questions to consider: Faulkner believes that attending to “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths” will help mankind avoid degrading itself to a level of mere physical survival. Will attending to these truths be sufficient? Is a conception of a supernatural God also needed? Conversely, what is lacking in writing “not of the heart but of the glands”?

With these introductions, we will meditate on the essay and its effect on us. This may seem like a long time – 10 minutes. Ignatius asks that we bring the powers of the mind to bear: memory, intellect and will. Memory relates this subject to other experiences we own. Intellect considers the material from different angles – what does it say about Truth, and what does it mean for me? Will decides how we want the subject matter to affect us: does it reinforce our ethics and behaviors, or change them? Ignatius suggests sometimes to focus even on individual words.

When we have completed the exercise, we should conclude with a “colloquy” with God. This works easiest if one has an experience of a personal God. Have a conversation or dialogue with God about the subject and what you wish to do with it. If one is a seeker but does not have a conception of God as personal, then one can stand in quiet and openness, asking for what one hopes for from the time and effort spent.

Then I hope we can discuss how we experienced this piece and share our responses to these questions.

(10 min)

Colloquy

Let’s open our discussion. We need to try to hear the person speaking, and avoid judgments. If we discuss this experience outside this setting, we should keep confidential the identities of who said what. This needs to be a safe place for sharing.

Any comments?

What I took away – and I have lived with this rich piece for many years – is that the human heart has to have struggles. We won’t be poets and writers, except to the extent that we author our own lives. But the heart (which is also the soul) struggles with how to relate to others. The struggles have to do with the quality of relationships: “the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice.” Sometimes the relationships have to do with others, and sometimes the relationships have to do with parts of oneself.

Faulkner does not tell us how to write, or live. He has a faith in the words and the processes of his young writers. But what he speaks of is akin to Spirituality – how does the heart and soul motivate and inspire itself to action and example? But he doesn’t say what to do. That struggle is ours to make.

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William Faulkner – Banquet Speech*

William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

* The speech was apparently revised by the author for publication in The Faulkner Reader. These minor changes, all of which improve the address stylistically have been incorporated here.

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