 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday October 29, 2001 Volume III Number 44 |
FOCUS - Lou Gehrig
Lately, when things seem to be closing in and stuff gets to me, I call Judy.
Judy is two days younger than I. That means we’ve pretty well traveled through the last half century together, though I didn’t know her name until a little more than a month ago. Our paths only crossed recently. But we’ve journeyed through the decades on parallel paths.
We both watched the same black and white TV shows on little flittering screens in the Fifties. In our classrooms, we were drilled on how to hide under our desks in the case of a nuclear attack (would that have helped?). We elementary school kids knew that the Soviet Union had intercontinental missiles aimed at us, and that all it would take was a push of a button. It was our childhood Armageddon fantasy. The End of the World was at the fingertips of the two Superpowers. Newsreels played and replayed the lightening flash and immense mushroom clouds from successive nuclear tests from some remote corner of the globe. We wondered then if we would ever grow up… and if we did, what kind of world would it be? But Ike lived in the White House then, with the outspoken Richard Nixon as his VP, a formidable counterpart to the fuming Nakita Khrushchev. Superman reminded us that Truth Justice and the American way could overcome just about any foe, except kryptonite, and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee worked hard to root out Communists wherever they may have infiltrated our social institutions. So while the threat of the end of the world was real, real enough to have our neighbors build home made bomb shelters in the back yard, we felt safe. Kind of. Howdy Dowdy and Clarabell made us laugh. The Mouseketeers liked us (“M. I. C. – see ya real soon! K. E. Y. – why? Because we LIKE you! M. O. U. S. Eeeee.) I had a thing for Annette. Judy probably had a thing for Spin… or maybe Marty.
In the Sixties, we were in high school when Walter Cronkite informed us that our President, JFK, died from those gunshot wounds. The war in Vietnam heated up to a crescendo as we went off to college. Our classmates were not students, but activists. Virtually every institution that our parents relied on to us was suspect. So there were sit-ins and student strikes and protest marches and candle-light vigils.
And here we are, decades later, sitting across the room, both of us having crossed the half-century mark, and Judy tells me, “Ken, I don’t want to die.”
She’s sensitive. She’s tired from her physical battle. Tears fill her eyes as she says it. A friend sent me there to see her because he thought I’d have some answers for her questions about God.
It’s
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a fatal disease of the motor neurons.
Motor neurons are the nerve cells that control our skeletal muscles. In 1941,
a famous professional baseball player died of the disease. The first to
identify it in 1874 was a French neurologist, who gave the awful illness its
clinical name. The major leaguer was Lou Gehrig. Since then, it’s been
commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Judy’s breathing is labored now.
With ALS, the muscles, loosing their nerve supply, weaken and atrophy and can eventually paralyze. Generally, the first parts of the body to be affected are the extremities, the legs and the arms. And then gradually, the chest muscles loose their capacity to inflate and deflate the lungs. Respiratory failure eventually leads to suffocation.
It’s been some time since Judy walked without some kind of assistance. She gets around in a wheel chair. But even that is getting more and more difficult as her disease progresses.
There is no medical cure for ALS.
* * * * * * *
Her brother, a technical guy and a builder, arranged to have a room equipped to care for her special needs.
They enlarged a room on the side of the house, and inside built a solid steel frame, four standards in each corner, and a square of steel around the perimeter. It looks like a box. From the frame, they suspended a metal rail from the ceiling that crosses over the adjustable hospital bed. Hanging from that rail, a motorized lift sits on the wheels of a small trolley with a hook suspended on a cable wrapped around a motor-driven pulley. The trolley runs freely on the rail above. After a nylon sling chair is arranged underneath her, steel clips are connected to the cable and at the push of a button Judy is lifted from her bed. To one side, the rail transports her to a waiting wheel chair, where she is gently lowered into position for her morning walk. Towards the other side of the bed, the rail curves off in two directions. An overhead switch allows the trolley to run either to a large tub for a bath or, by pulling the switch, she can be transported to the “throne,” as she describes it, to take care of personal business.
Her caretaker sees to the mechanics of it all. Next to her, an oxygen monitor to assist in her breathing.
This is the room where Judy spends her days.
The ALS is progressing now. Her physician just recently arranged for Hospice care.
* * * * * *
“You’re gunna have a problem with me,” she said in our first meeting.
“I don’t believe that the Bible is any more than ancient religious literature. I’ve got a problem with the Immaculate Conception and the Ascension of Jesus. I believe that his death was a primarily political thing. Religious history is filled with bigotry and violence and ignorance. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why innocent children suffer.” That’s when her voice choked and tears filled her eyes. She reached for a tissue. She was telling me the truth about how she viewed things.
“I read a lot,” she continued, “and to be blunt, there’s not much in the Christian religion that I agree with.”
That was the opener.
* * * * * * *
I’m not much of a debater.
I’ve taken courses and seminars on Apologetics. I always thought the name of the discipline, “apologetics,” was an odd label. I know that technically it has nothing to do with the implied idea – that maybe there is some kind of apology involved. As in, I’m sorry. “I’m so sorry to impose my beliefs on you… please let me explain.” No, that’s not it. Apologetics is the defense of the faith – the reasons why one believes - the intellectual, philosophical, historical basis for one’s religious point of view.
At its best, good apologetics satisfies the intellectual demands of belief and frees one to make a choice that is not a contradiction to one’s knowledge or experience. True spirituality should never be an abandonment of reason. At its worst, apologetics implies that one can be argued into belief - that superior debating skills, quick wit, impeccable footnoting, compelling evidence… that all this will overwhelm the skeptic and leave no room for the opposing view, obliterating objections and bring a doubter to his knees in humiliation, embracing the argument and after that, the truth.
I’ve rarely if ever seen it work that way.
So I didn’t even try to debate Judy on the question of miracle or history nor did I break out my apologetics notes.
A visiting chaplain made an interesting point. When Judy asked him how he feels about atheists and agnostics he replied that he believed that apart from a belief in God one could never be truly happy.
While I said I understood the point (and it’s not a bad point, actually), I suggested to Judy that faith in God has little to do with happiness, really. It has more to do with the truth question.
That’s when the real dialog started. It was a lively discussion there in a make-shift hospital room.
If the pursuit of happiness becomes my basis for belief, then religion is just sort of a nice alternative for people who are prone to be interested in spirituality. Choosing a religion is sort of like choosing a hamburger joint. Some like Big Macs, some Wendy’s, some In and Out. No burgers is OK, too. It’s just a matter of preference.
If happiness is the crux of the matter, I’ve got another challenge. What about the undeniable existence of evil and suffering in the world? Where do they fit? Are evil and suffering the result of unbelief? Unhappiness? More than that, if belief in God is simply something comforting, or soothing, or somehow contributes to personal satisfaction… then what about right and wrong? What about ethics? If belief simply makes me feel good… then is there any difference between religious ecstasies and say chemically induced mood enhancements?
So if truth rather than happiness is the primary criteria in assessing one’s decision about God, I said, then we need to talk about the nature of truth. Truth, by definition, is not something we create. It exists apart from our participation. It is indifferent to our opinions, our moods, our prejudices or our response to it.
This idea that we create our own truth appears to be the prevailing view these days. It’s common to hear people say, “Oh, that’s so very nice for you, that you have a belief that fills a need in your life. I am so happy for you. But understand that it is your truth, not mine. Don’t think for a minute that you can impose your version of reality on me.”
But ponder this - if something is true, it doesn’t matter what you think about it. It isn’t a matter of personal interpretation.
When the first aircraft hit the first of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, almost no one saw the impact. Only much later did a chance video surface. At the time, eyewitnesses only saw the smoke and the flames and the aftermath of the collision. My first news alert, via the Internet, speculated that the plane had been a small twin engine that had made a terrible navigational error. The truth, well known today, was that the craft was an airliner piloted by a terrorist. But few of us understood that just after the first crash. By the time the second airplane hit, video cameras were trained on the towers from every angle, and the second impact was hardly open to speculation. The entire world was watching. And technology enabled news organizations to play and replay and the world knew the truth.
The truth in the first incident was non-negotiable. There were many opinions about it, and much speculation - but only one truth. None of the guesswork had the slightest impact on the truth of what really happened that fateful Tuesday morning.
ALS does not affect the mind. Those who suffer the disease maintain a sharp intellect, clear thinking, the ability to speak and listen and process just as they did before the onset of this terrible malady. Our discussion had us both energized and engaged. It was invigorating dialog. Back and forth.
Then I relayed a highly personal recollection to Judy.
I preached a sermon one Easter Sunday morning long ago, I said. I was twenty-something at the time and I was enamored with Carl Jung and archetypes and symbol and the power of choice. Back then these things were more interesting to me than Bible commentaries and dry expository text-books. In what felt to me like triumphant self disclosure, on the very day my people celebrated the Resurrection, I announced from the pulpit that I was a Christian not because of some compelling evidence, but because I chose to believe. It seemed so profound at the time. Like I was Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and We the Living went ahead and carried on by exercising our exhilarating freedom to determine our own destiny.
But now, nearly thirty years later, I confessed to Judy that I don’t think that way anymore. I don’t believe because I choose to. I believe because it’s true.
Judy tried to correct me… “Remember, it’s your version of the truth,” she said with a smile.
“No, and that’s precisely the point. If it’s only my version of the truth, then it cannot be the truth at all. It’s the truth because it’s the Truth.”
“Oh,” she said. And she stopped to think. “It’s like the old philosophical question, ‘if a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear the sound of it, was there any noise?’”
“Exactly.”
I picked up on the metaphor and went on. “The prevailing view today is this: if no one was there to hear it, then there was no sound. It’s as though the only valid reality is personal experience. But Truth is much larger than personal experience. The truth is… it fell. It made noise. The fact that no one heard it is irrelevant to the truth.”
“The tree fell and it made a crash,” I repeated it for emphasis.
* * * * * * *
“I think this is going to surprise you, Ken,” Judy said in a conversation days later.
“OK. What is it? Should I guess?”
“I’m reading my Bible.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“What have you been reading?”
“Matthew, Mark and John.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s tearing me apart,” she said.
“How so?”
“What they did to Jesus.” Her voice cracked.
“Wow.”
Her answer caused me pause. “Judy, I think you may be gettin’ it.”
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Bob Buford wrote a book called “Half Time.” In it, he makes this observation: most of us spend the first half of our working career striving to achieve success. In the second half, most of us make a switch. We aren’t so much concerned about success as we are concerned about significance. We are less focused on bank accounts and stock portfolios and wealth accumulation and more focused on meaning and purpose and legacy.
“Judy,” I said, “it helps me to talk to you. Really.”
Her caretaker quipped, “Yeah I know, because it makes you feel like you are lucky you’re not her.”
“Nope, I hope that’s not it…” I responded. “You know, we’re all gunna be where Judy is… eventually. All of us.” Judy nodded in agreement. She smiled. I went on. “When I talk to Judy, the stuff that throws me off balance, and makes me annoyed and irritated, and keeps me from having clear perspective… well, those things kinda float away into nothingness.”
“Judy,” I turned to her, “you remind me that today matters. You remind me to make today count.”
“Good,” was all she said.
On this Monday morning, listen with me to Judy. Hear her questions. Wrestle with the Truth question. Listen for the sound of a falling tree. And ask yourself… if today was my last, how would I respond to the people in my life? To the interruptions? The demands? What priorities would I bring to today?
It’ll be Judy’s view.
It’ll be good for you… and your people.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
|
|