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Esquire posts a letter from Shaine Claiborne to those who are unbelievers.

It starts with an apology and ends with love.

Go Shane!

Here’s a smattering of it:

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because “God so loved the world.” That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our “Gospel” is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy… but the sick.” And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209#ixzz0XtxGu9Kk

This morning, I listened to a story on the news about a man in Belgium, who had been in a motor vehicle accident 23 years ago.

He was diagnosed as being in a coma, and was thought to have been in a vegetative state, with no awareness of his surroundings.

A recent scan of his brain showed this to not be the case.  The man’s brain activity showed him to be conscious – and after establishing communication with him through now available communication technology, he reports being aware for the whole time.

For 23 years, he was screaming inside, and because of near full paralysis, was unable to communicate.

I can’t even imagine that nightmare. In my mind, it’s only a 1/2 step better than being buried alive – at least in that instance you’d eventually die, and be put out of your misery.

But to be sentient, and unable to communicate – I can’t even fathom it.

I used to work at nursing home that had a coma unit.  When most people think of coma, they think of a person lying motionless and looking lifeless in a bed.

But that isn’t so.  There are different levels of coma – different degrees of unconsciousness.  The coma unit wasn’t a quiet place.  There were many people who were agitated, frightened and moaning.  I was never sure which was more disturbing – the complete silence or the sounds of living in a coma.

The coma unit is one that normally contains a lot of tragedy.  Babies who have drowned and lived, only to be vegetables, people who have gotten drunk and fallen out of trees onto their heads, and I recall one particularly sad story about a young woman who had been at a shoppping mall with her grandmother.  As she walked around the back of her car, her purse got caught on the back bumper, causing her to fall and strike her head, and landing her in a coma.  She was in her 20’s when the accident occurred, and her family spent a lifetime watching her live in a twilight – trapped between life and death.  Alive, but not living.  Alive, but not quite dying either – at least not nearly soon enough to suit anyone’s comfort.

To think of any of those folks living in those conditions, surrounded by medical equipment, and sometimes less than caring aids and nurses, with no one treating them as if they know what is happening, seeing how rarely their family members visit or how sad they are when they do, trapped inside their minds just hits me in a really deep place.  I can barely imagine the living hell that must be.

I used to feel that in so many of these cases, medicine had gone too far and simultaneously not far enough.  Their bodies were alive, but they would never have a life.  Their families struggled between praying for a miraculous recovery and praying for the death that would free them from the twilight.

And yet, medcial technology has freed at least one person from that awful existence.  Given them some chance to live – to make those necessary human connections through communication.

Working there definitely impacted my own definition of life – what it means to be alive.  And for me, breathing does not a life make.  I have told my family that in the event of this kind of brain injury I want to be let go.  I would not want to live in the twilight.

The Episcoblogger community has suffered some losses recently. I’ve noted the death of blogger Klady’s husband Jim+ below, and Larry, over at Renz in the Woods had to put down his beloved doggy Cosmo and my blog friend Kay who blogs at Ephemeral Thoughts also had to put her beloved Calypso down this weekend too! (I have great empathy for any who have to go through this experience. I did it with my cat Yoda, and I remember my whole body shaking, as I made the decision to extinguish his life, feeling that really, that decision should be way above my pay-grade. Three years later, it still brings tears to my eyes.  One of the most difficult decisions I ever had to make.)

Over the weekend, Roseann, from Give Peace a Chance, Please! came to the end of her long and painful battle with kidney disease.  She’d been on hospice about two weeks, and her husband reports she died peacefully and painlessly thanks to the loving care she received through that program.  Please, join me in lighting a virtual candle for the repose of her soul, and for the grief of her husband and champion, Gary.  Heaven has gained a spitfire angel this weekend.

I also learned yesterday, that my EfM mentor’s husband also lost his long battle with illness over the weekend as well.  He’d been in the hospital since the end of June, I believe and had many, many close to death experiences.  He was very sick and suffering.  Please join me in praying for the repose of Tom’s soul, and for the loving comfort of his wife, and my EfM mentor, Donna, who cared for him so lovingly.

Death is always so difficult, but death so close to the holidays is particularly odious to bear.  May God grant strength to those who will be facing the holidays without those they love for the first time – let’s add my cousin Helen here, and also blogger Lisa, who lost her husband Ian last spring.

I’ll also ask for prayers this week for my husband and me.  A year ago this week, events occurred that I thought would bring an end to my marriage.  I have hurt people whom I love, and I’m not sure I’ll ever heal from knowing the damage I’ve caused to them, but I’m trying.  Our marriage is in a better place than it has been in a long, long time, but this is going to be an emotionally difficult week for us both, and the sooner we get through Thanksgiving, the better, so it can be one more hurdle  behind us as we move on in continuing to heal our relationship.

Also, prayers for Grandmere Mimi who is having cataract surgery today.  The first eye was done successfully, and no problems are expected, but, we’ll pray to be sure!

ETA – Julie+ requests prayers for her parishoner Jerrey – who is struggling after having a heart attack.

And Grandmere Mimi’s surgery went well! TBTG!!

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Julian of Norwich.

While it is true that I was struggling with Kirkegaard this past week, here is something that I learned last night at EfM that is just profound, thanks to my EfM mentor Donna:

ETA: A follow up piece of learning from my friend Ann+:

Love

A man was sitting on the sofa watching TV when he heard his wife’s voice from the kitchen.

“What would you like for dinner, Love?  Chicken, Beef or Lamb?”

He said, “I’ll have chicken. Thank you.”

“Fuck you,” she said . . . “You’re having soup.  I was talking to the cat.”

Yesterday, I was having a phone conversation with my son as he was waiting in the car while his sister was being dropped off at gymnastics.  He was all excited that Christmas music was playing on the radio station, and he was making me listen to various different tunes, proclaiming that we should definitely open Christmas gifts to the Christmas classic Sleigh Ride (which brings back endless memories of mediocre jr and sr high school band/orchestra rehearsals of said classic: shudders).

I was decidedly NOT feeling as thrilled as my son was at the prospect of the holidays encroaching upon us. As I later drove over to join my Education for Ministry group (EfM), more tunes were on, and quite frankly, they were irritating me.

Me…the adult who was the child who listened to warbley 8-tracks of Johnny Matthis and Andy Williams Christmas tunes all year long, whose blue moods could easily be lifted by a cheerful Christmas ditty or touched by sappy, maudlin Christmas tunes.  Who always got a “magical” feeling in the depths of my soul at the sound of Christmas music – now…not so much.

How sad that this little piece of magic is eluding me.

It official – 40 is the year I’m getting curmudgeonly.

Last Friday night, my family and I braved some wet and awful weather to join other members of our Church Youth Group for some fellowship at the movie theater.  We went to see A Christmas Carol in 3D.  Some of the folks we went with didn’t care for it – it follows the Dicken’s story pretty closely…and with all the Christmafication of that story, it’s easy to forget that at it’s heart, it’s a pretty scary ghost story.  I think they did a great job with some of the darker elements – it was scary! And Jim Carey actually did a pretty good job voicing the parts of Scrooge and his haunts – which are of course, just elements of Ebeneezer himself. The ghost of Christmas Past was a bit freakay – a floating flame head on a sort of candle-wax body, and it was plain odd.  Lots of “flamer” comments during those sections (well, it was a predominantly male teenage group!)

The 3D aspect was, in my opinion, unnecessary.  The scenes where the ghosts had Ebeneezer flying over London were very effective – I had lots of stomach drops, but the rest, to me, just felt gratuitous. But eh..that’s just me.

All that movie viewing got us to talking about which movies we’d really like to see.  I’m totally up for seeing Ewan MacGreggor, and George Clooney inThe Men Who Stare At Goats, as well as my lovely Jude Law’s upcoming offering, starring the also lovely Robert Downey, Jr. – Sherlock Holmes. Both of those are on my short list of must sees.

Jenna is lobbying hard for New Moon, and with it’s pretty boy vampire star Robert Pattinson, I’m highly likely to indulge her in this wish. While the first film was nothing earth shattering in terms of the movie itself, it was not hard on the eyes, and the premise was mildly entertaining to me: very fluffy!

Pattinson, of course, was introduced to us via Harry Potter, where he played the handsome, yet ill-fated Cedric Diggory.  So, now both he and Potter are legal and I can lust away at them without fear of being thought a cradle robber!

Here’s a lovely shot of Pattinson from this month’s Vanity Fair…

YUMMERS! Heee!

Please pray for my blog friend Kathy, who blogs as Klady over at Lady of Silences.  While attending an ordination yesterday, her husband Jim+ had a massive heart-attack and died.

This is the second loss in as many years for Klady’s children, who only two years ago lost their biological father.

May God hold them all in the palm of his hands at this very difficult time.

Feel free to light a candle for them, as I have, by clicking through on the Light a Candle Icon in my sidebar.

When I was a little girl, I used to live in the country – downstate NY farm country in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains.  The house I grew up in rested between the homes of two elderly couples.  A German couple, the Pojes, lived to our right. They had a great expanse of a side yard between their house and ours that was filled with apple trees which all of us kids used to enjoy climbing, much to my neighbors’ delight and dismay!  Because I was the only girl amongst a bevy of rough and tumble boys, Mrs. Poje used to bring me inside her house and let me help her make applesauce in the fall! Mmmm – homemade applesauce! She would show me all her lovely tchotches and her really cool sewing room. I used to love to go there and listen to her tell stories in her warm, heavily accented voice, and if I close my eyes, I can still smell the way her house smelled – like lots of pies and love.

The couple who lived to our left were the Whites.  Their house was  rundown and their rickety front porch was always filled with “stuff”. They had a million cats, so I was always forever wandering over to their yard to get my cat fix. While I was never inside their house, I often used to chat with them when they sat out in their yard, and I remember them being the sweetest people you’d ever want to meet.  The Whites had a cluster of blackberry bushes in their yard which grew right beneath a towering oak tree (which, coincidentally, in the late fall would often fill with black crows and freak me out, a la Hitchcock’s The Birds – a film which was a heavily featured selection on the 4:30 Movie at the time, but I digress…). I spent lots of time picking berries there and enjoying their sweet goodness, my fingers stained from the effort.

When I was young, I was often told I had an old soul, and I used to wonder if that was really something good or not. Did that mean I was trying to be too big for my britches? Or did it mean I was “stuck up”, as my grandmother described my mild reticence among other kids? Maybe it meant I was boring!

But when I think back on it, maybe it was just that I was a rather solitary young girl surrounded by boys (a younger brother and three male cousins who lived across the street) and elderly people.  I guess I came to appreciate the quiet ways of my elderly neighbors, who in turn appreciated that I wasn’t breaking any of their windows or chasing their cats, and who enjoyed telling me I had an old soul (or maybe just a precocious vocabulary)!

Anyway, I came across this poem by Sylvia Plath, and it made me think of my lovely elderly neighbors, who are all long dead now, and the memories of them made me smile.

Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving.  Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices.  These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They acommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughes in black, cacophonous flocks -
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen,
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them.   A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, adn the face is orange rock
That looks out on  nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
September 1961

I figured it’s time for another update on Mary Beth – although really not much has changed.  She is now recovering at home and doing fairly well.  Her eyesight in one of her eyes it still a problem, and she is still frustrated with that. I again thank all of you who have been praying for her.