Winter and Acceptance

I saw Clark Brogan’s obituary today. He died at 91. In recent years he lived in Decatur, GA, but I knew him as a resident of Mattoon, IL, a retired printer who lived his Christian faith as a gentle but persistent voice on behalf of those Jesus called “the least of these.”

Around 20 years ago, when Clark was about the age I am now, I called on him in a hospital in Champaign, IL, by accident. I was there to see a member of my church. I try to avoid looking into patient rooms as I go down a hospital hallway. There’s little enough dignity for a hospital patient without strangers staring at you. Occasionally, though, you have to glance at room numbers for guidance. As I looked for a number, I saw Clark, sitting on a chair, hunched over in one of those awful hospital gowns. Since he was not a member of the church I served, I had not known he was in the hospital.

When I walked into his room, he looked up at me with such relief and anxiety at the same time. He reached out for my hand. “I’ve been trying to pray,” he said, “and I can’t. I can’t even remember what comes after ‘Our Father…’.”

“You’re in luck,” I said. “I know the whole thing.”

That got the smile I wanted. We prayed. We talked. With anguish he asked if he would ever be able to pray again. I assured him that it was just the anesthesia from his surgery and the pain killers after that had wiped out the rest of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s the kind of thing you know when your brain is whole, but which you forget when every cell in your body, including your brain, is depressed by anesthesia. I’m sure he prayed a lot in the 20 years since that chance encounter.

In the years of winter people are subjected to anesthesia and pain killers more often than in former years. And in the places of winter, in times of darkness and cold, people use pain killers more, too. [1]

When I was in campus ministry, one of my friends was Bill Toohey, the chaplain at Notre Dame. He told once of how a student came into his office one Monday and told about how he and his friends had partied all weekend. “Man, we were feelin’ no pain,” he said. “What pain were you not feeling?” Bill asked. The boy thought about it and said, “The pain of being me, I guess.”

That’s why we use pain killers, to take away the pain of being ourselves. Sometimes pain killers are a good thing. If my self is hurting because of some physical ailment, as when the tumor penetrated my bowel wall, I need something to kill the pain so that the physicians can take away the reason for the pain. On my birthday in 1990, my real self had a real tumor that caused real pain.

More often, the pains we want to avoid are emotional and spiritual and relational. We get used to taking away those pains of being our selves by using alcohol or drugs or gambling or sex or food or danger. As we become more like ourselves as we age, the addictions of spring and summer and fall are even more pronounced, and intractable, in winter.

Surrounded in winter by cold and snow, able to look back and forward better because of the slower pace that ice and wind require, that’s a good time to renew our faith in grace, that we are accepted, that we don’t have to be pained by being ourselves, so we don’t need to deaden that self-pain. God’s acceptance takes it away.

I think that’s what allowed Clark Brogan to live as one who was free to live for others. He couldn’t always remember what came after “Our Father,” but he knew he was accepted. [2]

[1] I suspect that’s why Alaska has such a high rate of alcoholism. Binge alcohol users in AK number over 115,000 in a month, more than 20% of the population. Or maybe they drink to forget about politics.
It’s also why the high school principal said in Brigid’s frosh orientation this fall that the drug and alcohol rate among UP teens is higher than the national average.

[2] Perhaps the best sermon ever, after the one on the mount, is Paul Tillich’s “You Are Accepted,” printed in his book of sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundations.” Tillich was a major figure in the NYC community of German immigrants who came here to escape the Nazis. Many of his fellow immigrants were Jews or atheists, but whenever he was preaching in chapel at Union Seminary, where he taught, he would call them up and tell them to be there. They came.