Christmas 2007
 
It’s a few days before Christmas and seems like a time to turn my thoughts that way and add some words after a seven-week hiatus following the table-sawn hand incident. I started any number of posts, but could never get past a kind of self-pitying funk of recovery from the “trauma” of the event—an official designation of Big Bad Life-Threatening and Incapacitating Things requiring treatment at a “Level 1 Trauma Center”. But that’s no joke; it’s real and it’s personal—as Seattle Suzanne, who knows about such things put it: “Trauma is in the eye of the experiencer”, so to speak, with Keene paraphrasing an old song, “You got your traumas, I got mine.” And I got a million of ‘em. Indeed, there’s this whole current of trauma flowing through my life just below the surface of consciousness that adds its negative power to the current trauma, like standing in the ocean when a little wave coming your way is joined by the big wave behind it and whomp! It takes a lot more energy to swim free of that, the drain of which, natch lends itself so nicely to my usual depression. In short, I don’t do any writing, except for sermons.
 
‘Course it didn’t help when the psychiatrist I see every couple of years called to say the insurance company wanted a reevaluation for disability, which, though entirely reasonable, brought up reminders of the last time they did this, which was, well, traumatic (ala, “We’re cuttin’ you off next month”, but that was three years ago). So I lived in this anxiety until we got together and had a chat, when he started reading off symptoms from the DSMIV, which is the official scientific diagnoses of various styles of craziness. He started with “depression” then upped it to “severe” and we talked about anxiety (“high”). I asked about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and somewhere in there he said some about being a bit bipolar. I’m not sure where we ended up, beyond scientific certification of craziness; which all of my pals down at the weekly lectionary study had already and unanimously agreed to certify, but they’re pastors not scientists.
 
Being traumatically and one-handedly laid up for that long left me with a lot of time for “meditating”. With nothing else to do I spent hours watching the hand meat heal. It’s been interesting, if not necessarily for the squeamish. The original protective (I guess) layer of scabs and sutures and dead skin and shit falls off; for awhile the daily wound cleaning was exciting, because that ugly—though necessary—old shit peels away to reveal pretty new pink skin, though I must observe that those around me didn’t seem quite as fascinated by it as I, ala, “Get that thing away from me.” But I sat and watched it, like some pilgrim before an icon—since it was always stuck in my face anyway (had to hold it above my heart for six weeks)—and wondered at the healing: layers of tough ugly scabs protecting the wound, while healing goes on underneath, in the darkness, as it were, beneath the surface and then the old shit comes off in little chunks eventually to reveal that healed, new life beneath, pink and smooth as a baby’s butt; the creation of new scars, eventually to become signs of the damage and healing that once took place there.
 
The body (and psyche) heals at its own rate, of course, though you can, my doctor assures me, screw it up; get in the way, as it were, of the natural healing processes through, say, neglect or impatience or ignorance. It’s gonna happen at it’s own rate, it will demand its own attention, and the choice is simply whether to cooperate with that or not. So I watch my wounds heal and begin to wonder why healing is the natural process of the body. What destined this to be the direction of nature? What is this cosmic urge towards healing; this energy? In short, why is there healing?
 
That’s been my mantra these days. Somebody asks, “Hey, Keene, how’s the hand?” the response will invariably end with it: why does the universe seem to move towards healing , in spite of all the deforming powers at loose in the world (ala the groaning creation of St. Paul)? I caught an article last week in which the guy—a philosopher of science (as contrasted with, say, a philosopher of religion) noted things this way: in all we know about creation, from the Big Bang to the discovery of parallel universes—the Earth is the one unique amalgam of all the forces necessary to create and sustain human life. How do we explain, asks this scientist, a beneficent universe? Why is there healing?
 
I’ve been preaching about John the Baptist the last couple of weeks because The Voice Crying In The Wilderness is part of the assigned Advent readings (ahem, prepare ye the way of the Lord); been wrestling with the difference between him and Jesus. Because there’s no doubt (in my mind) that Jesus was initially a disciple of John’s—Jesus was baptized by John; and they both saw themselves as participants in the prophetic tradition of Israel carrying out a theological critique of their society in the language of God’s judgment. That’d been going on since Moses and included Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and a whole Old Testament load of others over, say, a thousand years. They were both on the same page in this. Yet at the same time there is a discontinuity with Jesus: he rejects the apocalyptic violence of John’s god, ala, “Enough with the holy wars already” in Mt. 11, and he rejects the division of people into the righteous ones acceptable to god and the unrighteous heathen deserving of, in John’s imagery, the chopping axe, the burning chaff; of course, they deserve to die in the name of righteousness. Now, Jesus doesn’t directly say, “Hey, John, you’re wrong.” He tells him, “Here’s what I do—the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Not exactly the bravado of god, is it? Not exactly storming the kingdom of unrighteousness, proudly conquering the heathen, eh? He works among the hidden ones that the big powers ignore and victimize; he works to restore people in life together; he heals.
 
He speaks in some ways of a whole ‘nother god, working in hiddeness to create life and heal, like what’s taking place behind the scabs on my hand, working behind the cross, that scab on the world. The healing energy of the universe, God, including, of course the incarnate expression of doctors and physical therapists and inquiring friends and praying people and all the invisible energy in that.
 
While I’ve been going through my own trauma drama, Bluetooth Bill has been living in a nightmare, including among other things, his wife’s so far 22-day hospitalization for severe heart stuff made that much worse by a score of other medical conditions. He’s been sending out daily updates, always closing by thanking for and asking for more prayers. The guy’s a prayer junkie—albeit for good reason (“divine necessity”, eh?). So I pray for ‘em. But I don’t pray to a god twiddling his finger for a poof of divine magic; it seems to me that my prayers have more to do with participating in the healing energy already at work there, adding to it, is it were. Seattle Suzanne once commented that the reason to participate in a healing service even if you don’t need healing is to add yourself to that energy. Cool enough.
 
I was caught by a little ditty by Ann Weems posted in our synodical newsletter. Seemed to fit somehow:
   
                    Against our Better Judgment
 
                        We told her she couldn’t go;   
                she was too young
                to stay up that late.
She told us that 
                Baby Jesus
                would be there      
                and he was younger
                than she.
 
We told him he couldn’t go;   
                he was too old
                to brave the cold
                                night air.
He told us he’d rather greet heaven from the Christmas Eve service   
                than be found slumped by the TV
 
So we bundled them up against the extreme cold   
                against their own defenselessness   
                against our better judgment       
                                and they went out with joy.
 
My prayer is that those of us who think   
                that we’re in charge of the world
                                and the church       
                will remember that the stable
                                was filled with such as these:   
                those who could not be kept      
                                from rejoicing