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Dame Cicely Saunders: Advocate for the dying, and for life

In 1975 at the MacRobert Centre in Stirling, I first heard the late Dame Cicely Saunders speak about the nature of hospice care. Amongst the arguments she used was that the humanity of a society can be measured by the way it responds to the needs of the most vulnerable, those whose contribution to society can no longer be measured in cash value terms. By which she meant that the care of the dying human person, and the support and accompaniment of their family should be a priority in any humane society. She spoke as a nurse, a former social worker, a doctor, a Christian and a determined and formidable advocate for dedicated, highly skilled, fully resourced provision for the dying as a right

Ever since, I've been a passionate supporter and strong believer in the role of the hospice in modern health care. A view which, whether or not shared by successive Governments, still seems to fall short of outright approval of adequate funding. And yes – there are hard budget decisions, health care priorities, variations in local provision, a growing gulf between resources and an increasingly elderly and resource expensive population. But for all the dedication, compassion, responsibility and skilled care of nurses in our general hospitals, it isn't possible within that widely demanding context to provide the specialist care and patient specific treatment in palliative medicine and family support, that is possible in the purpose built and resourced hospice.

The very fact we are able to discuss hospice care at all owes much to the vision, determination, courage, and refusal to take no for an answer that was one of Cicely Saunders great spiritual gifts. I've just bought the volume of her letters and will be reading this as part of my Lenten reflections. Not because they are "lenten material" (whatever that might be anyway!), but because she is one of those remarkable Christian women whose life's work was carried out against a strong tide of resistance. Medicine is a profession that during the second half of the 20th Century only slowly, and with some reluctance, welcomed the contribution of women in the higher levels of professional recognition and vocational influence. In my current interest in biography as theology, she is an example both of spiritual journeying and vocational constancy – her practice of the Gospel was embodied in her advocacy for the right of the dying to die with dignity and as much of their humanity intact as modern skill and knowledge allows. As she said often to patients who came under her care, "You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life." That is not a specifically Christian principle, but it was backed by specifically Christian ethical and theological values.

17 March 2009
“Libraries at War” from U A Fanthorpe, Collected Poems 1978-2003

One of the presents given for my birthday was the Collected Poems 1978-2003 of U A Fanthorpe. Not reading it through though, at least not yet. In any case it's a good book to have on the desk for those moments when you want a poem – in the same way that sometimes you want a coffee. And such an occasional but regular use of a book of poems takes it no less seriously than going to put on the kettle. Poetry on demand is no bad thing, and this book has seldom disappointed. The poem "Libraries at War", about the civilising and humanising activity of reading as a form of resistance to war reminded me of how J B philips translated the New Testament into modern english – while taking shelter in the London underground during the blitz. As the bombs fell, ancient texts first written on papyrus, translated into spiritual truth more accessible to a modern world needing to hear again the message of reconciliation. Fanthorpe's poem celebrates that persistent enjoyment of beauty, truth and goodness that lies at the heart of human creativity, and hope for a human future.

Libraries at War

The more you destroy them, the louder we call for books.
The war-weary read and read, fed by a Library
Service for Air-raid Shelters and Emergency Teams.

We can still come across them, the pinched economy
Utility war-time things, their coarse paper, their frail covers.
Such brightness in the dark: Finnegan's Wake,

The Grapes of Wrath, The Last Tycoon, Four Quartets,
Put out More Flags . On benches, underground,
In Plymouth, Southampton, Gateshead, Glasgow, in the Moscow Metro
They sit, wearing a scatter of clothing, caught off-guard,

The readers reading, needing it, while terror
Mobilizes in sound-waves overhead,
Lost in the latest. Something long. Or funny.

Fire, fear, dictators all have it in for books.
The more you destroy them, the louder we call.

When the last book's returned, there is nothing but the dark.

U A Fanthorpe, Collected Poems, 1978-2003, page 468.

16 March 2009
Daily Bread and The Lord’s Prayer.

Daily Bread.

Bread!

Give?

This
day!

Hunger's name?

Daily
breadlessness.

“Give
us this day our daily bread.”

Breadless
mothers starve, yet feed the child their life-blood milk.

Fathers
whose potency once was gift of life, blinded through tears of impotent despair.

“Our
Father, who art in heaven”, for these our brothers and sisters on earth, “Give
[them] this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses…..”

15 March 2009
The beautiful game illustrated

The picture was sent as a gift from Joanna, a small friend. Good eh?
Suggests that one of the ways Aberdeen could win a game is to play with three balls and shoot both ways. No more puzzling than some of Jimmy Calderwood's other tactical decisions. Also shows great imagination cos the footballers are smiling as if what they were playing was a game. Which it is! Thanks Joanna.
PS.9.00pm: Her dad is now smiling cos Liverpool wiped the smile of Manchester United faces

14 March 2009
Finally Comes the Poet: Brueggemann on Job

One of the long term benefits of conversation with Walter Brueggemann is the familiarity of surprise. That isn't an oxymoron. It's a promise. Those who read Brueggemann will find that his take on a text can seem at first odd and off centre – surprisingly so. And then you realise that the text he is exploring is itself odd and off-centre. Indeed texts that deal with God, human longing, a broken, angry or frightened world, are likely to be texts that don't easily fit our conceptual comfort zones.

Take for example the two or three pages on Job, when Brueggemann is dealing with God's response to the insistent human voice of faith. Last autumn I read the superb commentary on Job by Samuel Balentine – that was an education in exegesis, pastoral theology and literature-enriched reflection on human life as free and constrained, as tragedy and praise, as faith at the wild extremes of created experience. That great nugget masterpiece Job, attracts some of the most creative theological minds and sympathetic textual interpreters – including Brueggemann.

Amongst the comments of Brueggemann on Job, (I so wish he would write a commentary on that book), are several paragraphs where his concern is to point to an honest preaching of texts whose oddity defies neat categories, and whose purpose is to embrace the strangeness of texts which deal with the ultimacy of God for human life. So here is some of Brueggemann on Job (illustrated by one of William Blake's paintings – themselves eerie and profound commentary on Job):

"Job pushes his attack on God as far as a voice in israel dare push. In chapter 9 Job asserts not only that God is unrelaible, but is in fact a liar (20-22). Job never pushes to God's nonexistence, for then he would quit speaking and be reduced to silence. Muteness is practical atheism. Job keeps believing and speaking; he lives for the dispute. Likely that is why in ancient israel there are no atheists. The conversation of faith is the best action in town. Job is characteristic of Jewishness that finds dispute a viable, crucial form of faith. Job delineates his experience of negation, of God's absence and silence, of God's refusal to deal with his issues. Job yearns most for an anaswer, any answer, because he prefers harsh dialogue to an empty monologue.

….Faith if it is to survive knowingly and honestly, must live in an unjust world….Job learns that while the world may not be to his liking, the world will hold at its centre because it is God's world. The world does not rest in Job's virtue. In the end Job is released for yielding and submission, for trust and praise, and finally he is released for freedom to live."
(Finally Comes the Poet, 61, 62)

13 March 2009
Prayer for Marilyn Monroe, Jade Goody, and for ourselves

A long time ago I came across a prayer for Marilyn Monroe, written by Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan Catholic poet-politician. It is a careful account of what happens to a woman who becomes iconic, and whose value and identity are conferred on her by public attention and media hype. Marilyn Monroe the celebrity was created by a culture hungry for glamour, eager for scandal, and addicted to vicarious experience. Vicarious experience is when we can observe from a safe distance other people living the life we wish we could but never will, or in which their hurt and brokenness becomes a spectacle, a performance which we watch without ever encountering the painful reality.

When I say the prayer for Marilyn Monroe is a "careful account", I mean the account was full of that kind of care that begins with compassion, moves to anger and ends with a prayer for her peace, and for our forgiveness for reducing a human being to the level of our personal entertainment.

I am feeling something similar about the coverage of Jade Goody's illness. I've accompanied enough people through this later stage of a life journey to respect vulnerability, revere human courage, recognise the beauty and poignancy of our very human desire to live the gift of life fully. To do this in the public eye, with privacy auctioned to Digital TV and tabloid papers, and for the entire process to be orchestrated by a publicist, indicates a culture in which ethical norms and respect for human dignity have encountered their own credit crunch. We have become voyeurs of grief, trying to make death a virtual reality.

The good that is done in publicising the need for vigilance and research funding for this kind of cancer; the earning of enough money to ensure financial security for her children; even the strength Jade herself generates through turning her last weeks into a reality TV performance; each of these can be defended as reasons why Jade is doing this.

And I have no criticism whatsoever for her. My sadness and outrage come from somewhere else. Jade Goody's life story is one in which some of the most serious deficiencies in our social care of children and vulnerable young people are exposed. Since her career was launched through Big Brother she has endured adulation and opprobrium, that see-saw of love and hate the media revels in all the way to the bank, but which is lethally corrosive of a person's identity and self-worth. Our fascination with celebrity culture over mere humanity, our preference for reality TV instead of reality, our capacity through media coverage to make and break our gods (lower case intended), and the huge financial power of fame and infamy as vehicles for public entertainment; these have created a culture in which the celebrity is no longer considered a human person, and the first stone always lies nearby, ready to be thrown. There can be few more damning illustrations of our society's lost values than our endorsing of a process which puts entertainment value on a young woman's dying. I think what I find most distressing in this is the default selfishness of a culture where tears, sympathy and even grief are dissolved into the acid of reality TV and celebrity public self-exposure.

All of this arises out of praying the Lord's Prayer. How? Because that clause about being forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us, raised for me the old question about the sinner and the sinned against. Is Jade Goody sinner or sinned against? In one sense we all are – sinner and sinned against. But in some lives the damage sustained in growing up and trying to make a way in life seems disproportionate. And it can decisively shape who we are.

But this I believe. Whoever Jade Goody really is, God knows. I mean it. God does know. And the love and assurance, the security and the peace, the acceptance and healing of soul that we all long for, Jade included, depend on the truth of that central affirmation of Christian faith, that in Jesus, the friend of sinners, we are shown that God is love – and what kind of love God is. Jade and her children have been christened – I've no idea what all that was about other than this. In God's eyes Jade Goody is not and never has been, the composite cipher of a media circus. She is a daughter, a woman, a mother, a person with a name, and she is known to God. And the God whose love is seen in Jesus will treat her with a compassion and love infinitely more redemptive and non-judgmental than the celebrity culture that thinks it created her. Jesus doesn't throw stones.

Jade Goody hasn't tried too hard to conform to the expectations of "respectable society" – like other in your face celebrities she's been exploited by her public. In fact she reminds me more of those less reputable women whose names Jesus knew. Those women who found that when it comes to knowing who they are, and being gifted with a deeper sense of their value and loveability, it isn't the media machine, or the all consuming audience that matter. It's the One who knows and speaks their true name, and who knows more deeply than any other, that there are those who love much because they have been forgiven much (the name of the Dali painting above).

And so I pray. ….."Our Father, ….forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us". Sinner and sinned against – hard to separate, hard to know. God knows though. And that's enough – for Jade and for us, and for Jade as included in us fallible, wounded, wondering and loved sinners that we all are.

Lord have mercy.

                  Christ have mercy.

                                               Lord have mercy

11 March 2009
Transfiguration and living to the glory of God

The memorial tablet of Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury reads,

"The Glory of God is the living man and the life of man is the vision of God."

Ramsey's best book was The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ. It isn't so much a book of technical NT scholarship as a study that opens up the Gospel text with studied reverent care. In it a young Ramsey reflects on the ambiguity of that glory which both reveals and obscures the presence of God, but which in Jesus compels such attention as judges us all.

Out of his own praying he wrote this scholarly meditation on one of the most mysterious and transformative stories of Jesus. In Ramsey's own spirituality he grew in later years to contemplate further on this Christ-enriched sense of glory. And by glory he meant the shining splendour of love diffused with holiness, and that dazzling holiness incarnate in the One in whom all the fullnes of God's love was pleased to dwell.

"The Glory of God is the living man and the life of man is the vision of God."

"Yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever…."

10 March 2009
Kimi the Clumber spaniel.

Two good friends have just been adopted by a Clumber spaniel. Kimi arrived over the weekend on a quality inspection visit and is well pleased, other than the usual hesitations of dogs who expect high standards of accomodation and cuisine. But she's decided to stay. However being a Clumber spaniel she is genetically programmed to assume a more superior status than her ordinary springer, cocker and king charles cousins (note the lower case in their breed names). She's also a bit fussy about who gets to stroke her, and highly selective in those she deigns to acknowledge with as much as a tail wag. Next time I visit I'm hoping to be noticed.

But when it comes to landing on your paws Kimi, it doesn't come better than landing in the living room of two dog loving folk like my friends. Just to ensure things go smoothly I prepped the new owners by presenting them with the well known dog manual, Feng Shui for Dogs! You know – bed beside radiator, food and water accessible and in dishes that don't skite across the shiny floor every time you eat from them. That kind of thing! Enjoy Kimi – if there's a promised land for Clumbers you've found it!

9 March 2009
The Stilling of the Tempest, Monika Liu Ho Peh

A favourite picture of a favourite story from my favourite Gospel

8 March 2009
Lord’s Prayer Fibonacci

Fib: a poem of
20 syllables in which the number of
syllables in each line is the total of the two previous lines – thus
1,1,2,3,5,8. You can of course continue upwards so that the next line
is 13, then 21, then 34 after which it gets too silly I think.

Fib poems are
based on the Fibonacci mathematical sequence.

This one could be better. But I still find the discipline of word control an effective way of clarifying some of the thoughts that come when praying the Lord's Prayer regularly, with eyes open to the world.

Hallowed be your name

Wait.

Pray.

Slowly.

"Our Father…."

Holy muttering.

Anamnesis. Daily reminder.

God's in His Heaven, and all's (far from) well with the world.

Pater noster. Bread for hunger, forgiven wrong, hearts resilient and set free.

Human life flourishing, name of God hallowed, the will of God who is Love lovingly lived. Let us pray, not for me, for us, "Our Father….."

7 March 2009