Accepting whatever life offers: Remen excerpt #4

Dr Remen says that as as a child she hid pieces of a puzzle that her parents were working on, which were dark and made her feeling uncomfortable. When her parents asked if she knew where the missing pieces were, she showed them and explained her feeling. She recalls watching her mother complete the puzzle . . .

As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded. I had not known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the game had made no sense.

Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time—the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger. What brief glimpses I have had of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift every last piece.

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. I have been with many people in times of profound loss and grief when an unsuspected meaning begins to emerge from the fragments of their lives. Over time, this meaning has proven itself to be durable and trustworthy, even transformative. It is a kind of strength that never comes to those who deny their pain.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable. Many of my patients also seem to have found their way to this viewpoint on life.

When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a pace of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. As a friend with HIV/DISA puts it, ‘I have let go of my preferences and am living with an intense awareness of the miracle of the moment.’ Or in the words of another patient, ‘When you are walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.’

From such people I have learned a new definition of the word ‘joy.’ I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to live despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing.

There is a fundamental paradox here. The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become. The less we have preferences about life, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life. Embracing life may be more about . . . trusting one’s ability to take joy in the newness of the day and what it may bring. More about adventure than having your own way.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 170-171.
 

A stone survival ritual: Remen excerpt #3

Dr Remen writes: One of the most common things people with cancer tell me is that experiences of hospitalization and treatment are profoundly isolating. I suspect that this sense of aloneness may even undermine the will to live. When we feel the support of others, many of us can face the unknown with greater strength. I often use ritual to help people at times like this.

For more than twenty years I have offered a very simple yet powerful ritual to people before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery. I suggest they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. It does not matter how large or small the group is, but it is important that it be made up of those who are connected to them through a bond of the heart.

Before this meeting I suggest they find an ordinary stone, a piece of the earth, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand and bring it to the meeting with them. The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or relationships. Or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought. When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say such things as, ‘What brought me through was determination,’ ‘What brought me through was faith,’ ‘What brought me through was humor.’ When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, ‘I put determination into this stone for you,’ or,’ ‘I put faith into this stone for you.’

Often what people say is surprising. Sometimes they tell of crises that occurred when they were young or in wartime that others, even family members, may not have known before, or they attribute their survival to qualities that are not ordinarily seen as strengths. It is usually a moving and intimate meeting and often all the people who participate say that they feel strengthened and inspired by it. After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearly and hold in their hand when things get hard.

I have had several patients go to their chemotherapy, their radiation, or even their surgery with their stones strapped with adhesive tape to the palm of one of their hands of the bottom of their foot.

Over the years, many of the oncologists and surgeons in our community have learned about these stones from their patients and are very careful about them. One surgeon even had the staff go through the hospital laundry in search of a stone that was accidentally thrown away with the sheets sin the recovery room. I asked why he had done this and he laughed and said, ‘Listen, I have seen people do badly after surgery and even die when there was no reason for it other than the act that they believed they wouldn’t make it. I need all the help I can get.’

Actually, no one has chemotherapy or radiation or goes into an operating room without the thoughts, hopes, and prayers of many people going with them. The stone seems to make all that a little more plain to people and reminds they of the strength and beauty of what is natural. In an environment which is highly technical and sterile, it connects them to the earth. Ritual is one of the oldest ways to mobilize the power of community for healing. It makes the caring of the community visible tangible, real.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages151-153.

Anything good is forever: Remen excerpt #2

Dr. Remen writes of dying: Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. “Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,” he told us quietly. “My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

Sometimes the particulars of the way in which someone dies, the time, place, even the circumstances, may cause those left behind to wonder whether the event marks the healing of hidden patterns and personal issues, and answers for that person certain lifelong questions. Death has been referred to as the great teacher. It may be the great healer as well. Educare, the root word of ‘education,’ means to lead forth the innate wholeness in a person. So, in the deepest sense, that which truly educates us also heals us.

The theory of karma suggests that life itself is in its essential nature both educational and healing, that the innate wholeness underlying the personality of each of us is being evoked, clarified, and strengthened through the challenges and experiences of our lifetime. All life paths may be a movement toward the soul, In which case our death may be the final and most integrating of our life’s experiences.

Anything that is real has no beginning and no end. The stories in your life and in mine do not stop here.

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 300-301, 325, 331, 333.

Being a human is never over: Remen excerpt #1

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., is Professor of Family Medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine. She is the founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), which was at Commonweal for decades and is currently at Pure Healthcare in Dayton, Ohio. As a medical educator, therapist, and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to find individual meaning and purpose in the practice medicine, and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 65 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength, and viewpoints of both doctor and patient.

Dr Remen writes: Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.

Perhaps the unique process which is a human being is never over. Even at death. (Italics added.)

Perhaps the world is one big healing community and we are all healers of each other. Perhaps we are all angels. And we do not know.

I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. When we pray, we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life. It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways, it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times which were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder.

I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don’t seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places; life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. And unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),pages 220, 224, 270, and 293.

Amazing grace: Pagels excerpt #7

Historian of religion Elaine Pagels begins her book Why Religion? with this personal affirmation: When I began to read the Gospel of Thomas, a list of a hundred and fourteen sayings that claims to reveal "the secret words of the living Jesus,” what I found stopped me in my tracks. According to saying 70, Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Struck by these words, I thought, We’re not asked to believe this; it just happens to be true. Whether Jesus actually said this, we can’t know for sure, but to me that didn’t matter. What did matter was the challenge.

She ends her book with a reflection on her experience of being recognized for her achievements at a Harvard University graduation ceremony: the invisible bonds connecting everyone there, and connecting all of us with countless others and with our world and whatever is beyond it, felt stronger than ever, echoing the words of an ancient Jewish prayer: "Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day." However it happens, sometimes hearts do heal, thorough what I can only call grace.

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 23, 210). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition

 

Her words remind me of the verse from the hymn, "Amazing Grace" . . .

 

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home. 

The lyrics to "Amazing Grace" were penned by the Englishman John Newton (1725-1807). Once the captain of a slave ship, Newton converted to Christianity after an encounter with God in a violent storm at sea.

The change in Newton's life was radical. Not only did he become an evangelical minister for the Church of England, but he also fought slavery as a social justice activist.

Newton inspired and encouraged William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a British member of Parliament who fought to abolish slave trading in England.

 

Knowledge of the heart: Pagels excerpt #6

Pagels writes in Why Religion? “The Gospel of Truth, then, is all about relationships—how, when we come to know ourselves, simultaneously we come to know God. Implicit in this relationship is the paradox of gnosis—not intellectual knowledge, but knowledge of the heart. What first we must come to know is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding. But what we can know is that we’re intimately connected with that divine Source, since ‘in him we live and move and have our being.’

 

“. . . this is myth as Plato told it: imagination revealing the deeper truths of human experience. So, the speak concludes, ‘If, indeed, these things have happened to each one of us,’ then we can see that this mythical story has real consequences.

 

“On the other hand, when we recognize how connected we are with one another and with ‘all beings,’ this author says, we may ‘say from the heart that you are the perfect day; in you dwells the light that does not fail.’ And recognizing this, in turn, impels us to act in ways that acknowledge those connections:

“Speak the truth with those who search for it . .  support those who have stumbled, and extend your hands to those who are ill. Feed those who are hungry; give rest to the weary . . . strengthen those who wish to rise; and awaken those who are asleep.

 

“Is this really Paul’s secret teaching? We can’t know for sure. As we’ve seen, some scholars agree that the renowned Egyptian teacher Valentinus wrote this gospel, since its language resonates with a famous poem that he wrote, and with the few fragments of his teaching that survive. Did the author receive Paul’s secret teaching orally, handed down in succession from a disciple named Theudas, who received it from Paul? Maybe so, since that’s what Valentinian tradition claims; alternatively, its author may have drawn on Paul’s letters to write it himself.

 

“I’ve come to love this poetic and moving story for the way it reframes the gospel narrative. Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, or somehow as ‘good for you,’ this author sees it rather as Buddhists do, as an essential element of human existence, yet one that may have the potential to break us open out of who we are. My own experience of the ‘nightmare’—the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified—has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (pp. 203). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The mystery of Christ in you: Pagels excerpt #5

Pagels writes in Why Religion? “When the author of the Gospel of Truth sets out to reveal Paul’s secret teaching, he begins by asking, What happened before the beginning of time? In answer, he offers a primordial drama of creation, telling how, when ‘all beings’ began to search for the One from whom they came forth, they couldn’t find him. Feeling abandoned, not knowing where they came from, they suffered anguish and terror, like children wandering in the dark, searching in vain for their lost parents. As this gospel tells it, what separates all beings, including ourselves, from God is not sin. Instead, what frustrates our longing to know our source is its transcendence, and our own limited capacity for understanding. Yet when these beings—or when we—realize that we can’t find our way home, don’t know where we came from, or how we got here, we feel utterly lost. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, we may rush into paths that lead nowhere, more lost than ever, imagining that there’s nothing beyond the confusion we see in the world around us.

“At this point, the Gospel of Truth turns toward a drama of cosmic redemption. When the Father sees his children terrified and suffering, ensnared by negative energies, he sends his Son, ‘the hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ,’ to show them a path and bring them back ‘into the Father, into the Mother, Jesus of the infinite sweetness.’ And although, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, ignorant and violent ‘rulers of this world’ tortured and crucified Jesus, the Father overturned their conspiracy, transforming even their hideous crime into a means of grace.

“To show this, the Gospel of Truth reframes the vision of the cross from an instrument of torture into a new tree of knowledge. Here Jesus’s battered body, ‘nailed to a tree,’ is seen as fruit on a tree of ‘knowing the Father,’ which unlike that tree in Paradise, doesn’t bring death, but life, to those who eat from it. Thus, the author suggests that those who participate in the Eucharist, eating the bread and drinking the wine that, symbolically speaking, are Jesus’s flesh and blood, ‘discover him in themselves’ while he ‘discovers themselves in him.’

“After years of contending with familiar Jewish and Christian sources, I found here a vision that goes beyond what Paul calls ‘the message of the cross.’ Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, this gospel suggests that, seen through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we’re connected with each other, and with God; what Paul’s letter to the Colossians calls ‘the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. No wonder, then, that Christians called their sacred meal a mystery (mysterion), a Greek term later translated as ‘sacrament’ (from Latin sacramentum).”

“The author of the Gospel of Truth rejects images of God as a harsh, divine judge who sent Jesus into the world ‘to die for our sins.’ Instead, he suggests, the loving and compassionate Rather sent Jesus to find those who were lost, and to bring them back home. So rather than see the writing on the cross as any death sentence—whether Pilate’s or God’s—this author suggests instead that Jesus published there ‘the living book of the living,’ a book ‘written in our heart’ that teaches us who we really are, since it includes the names of everyone who belongs to God’s family.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (pp. 200-201). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.