Before the Fall

I want to be clear that I loved working where I worked: I loved the people, and the patients and their families. I had always felt that serving as an end of life care chaplain was what God called me to do, and serving out that call through that particular place was, well, maybe as close to vocational paradice as I was going to get in this life!

So now that I've been sent out, I'm having Paradise-related reflections upon my experience. And I'm finding some parallels.

After the First Couple-- and I think that I have renewed appreciation for the trouble people can get into together, much more really than when we are left to our own devices!-- after the First Couple ate, there was this sort of lull. Nothing happened to them right away.

And then, I think it is good to note: God came looking for them! He missed them, maybe, when He was out on His usual evening walk, maybe enjoying the sunset. I mean, sunsets shared are always a lot nicer than sunsets witnessed alone!

But here's what I take from this: Last week, when I was put on suspension before I was finally terminated, it was like the Lull after the First Couple ate. And I realized that, over the course of those days, God came looking for me. I needed God to seek me out. I needed to know that I was not abandoned by God simply because my employer was preparing to let me go...

And I felt found... I probably felt more comforted than the First Couple did, I might say! But I also felt that, in being found, I was also being prepared for the consequences that were going to come. "This is how it is going to be..." That sort of thing.

And truth be told, I was already feeling a little "naked" to the world-- vulnerable. The familiar world takes on a different aspect once there's been a death, or even when there is about to be. Part of what makes us secure in this world, able to live in it as it is and as we are, has to do with our work and our working. I've been unemployed before, and I dreaded being so again. The whole world seems foreign, distant and unavailable. No purchase, not for any commodity, is made lightly. There is a tentative character to existence itself, an uncertainty, a wariness, a wondering what is next-- and a heightened sense that things may only get worse before they get better, whatever "better" might be.

Even during the suspension I was being held in suspense! But I mean that part about "being held," for God went looking for me, and God found me.

And while God did not keep me from the consequences that were to come, just as he did with the First Couple, God "clothed" me... with "skins"... I needed this. I needed to feel some additional "skin" to my own. I needed to feel "clothed" more than I was, and thus comforted and readied to face what was almost certainly coming...

This is my experience of God: just when I am feeling most ashamed of myself, God seeks me out, and comforts, and covers me as only God can.

And here's what I mean by that, by how that happens: I learned a long time ago, and relearned earlier this year, about Immanuel Kant's distinction of two kinds of dignity. On the one hand, there is "inherent" dignity, the dignity that is "in" us, "of" us, simply because we exist, or as I like to say, because we are Creatures of God.

On the other hand, there is what Kant called "attributed" dignity, the dignity and respect accorded to us by those around us. Sometimes this comes because of position or title, and lots of times it comes as a gift from those who love us.

In end of life care, we learn that, as we die, our inherent dignity often takes a beating, because so much of the process of dying entails regressing to earlier states of being, and it is very hard to maintain a sense of one's dignity when one is feeling ever-more helpless. Thus it is important to gather around oneself those who care enough to attribute to one enough dignity to make up for whatever losses of dignity one is experiencing.

And I would say, it is important to find oneself gathered 'round by God's embrace, in order to be reminded, in a way only God can, that one's inherent dignity is being maintained and reinforced, even when one cannot do this for oneself.

So it was for me that even during my own "lull," during my suspension, before the axe fell, I could feel God's Presence, God's embrace, God's preserving my inherent dignity, even as I felt it was being more threatened than maybe it ever had before.

At times like I am going through, when I am feeling naked to the world, only God's "skins" are enough to keep me from coming out of my own.

Blessings...