Holy faces, public places: transgressing and treasuring.

Billman, Kathleen D.

Phyllis Anderson's down to earth and buoyant spirit has inspired me since the days we first sat down beside each other in "Rambo Greek" so many years ago, just beginning our respective seminary journeys. Since then our lives have circled away and reconnected many times. The reconnections have been a steady reminder of the grace of friendship in Christ through many seasons of life.

One of the many places where Phyllis exercised wise and visionary leadership was as Director of Pastoral Studies and Instructor in Theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago from 1985-87. It is in honor of Phyllis's gifts as a pastoral leader, teacher, and mentor that I offer these reflections, whose point of departure comes from one of Phyllis's own statements about how to effect transformational change: "You will teach by who you are, what you do, and how you do it, as much as by what you tell people." (1) The story of one of our mutual friends, who in her dying taught by who she was, what she did, and how she did it is the center of a reflection on the relationship between personal and corporate faith, private and public life, and how seminaries and faith communities may facilitate learning about these connections.

Transgressing

Death is a condition or a state, but dying is a story. (2)

The prolific writer bell hooks speaks of education as a practice of freedom that calls for "teaching to transgress." Recognizing that educational institutions are not "paradise" she asserts that

   The classroom, with all its limitations, remains
   a location of possibility. In that field
   of possibility we have the opportunity to
   labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves
   and our comrades an openness of mind
   and heart that allows us to face reality even
   as we collectively imagine ways to move
   beyond boundaries, to transgress. This
   is education as the practice of freedom. (3)

There is nothing like being confronted with mortality or crushing grief to unearth our assumptions and evoke questions about what matters most in life (and death); to reveal our embodied responses to the stark realities and boundaries of life, and not just our ideas about how we will or should respond to them. Recognizing the importance of encountering mortality and grief in preparing for ministry and not just intellectualizing about these realities, ELCA candidates for ordained ministry are required to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), and for many students CPE offers ample opportunities to explore their own "default" responses to human suffering and the implications of those responses for how they relate to people in their care. Seminary is only one environment in which learners explore the terrain of suffering. Congregations may offer pastoral care education for ministry through more formal education such as Stephen Ministry or Befriender's Ministry, or through other kinds of care networks, and offer opportunities for caregivers to theologically reflect on their experiences.

Although students may have the opportunity to debrief CPE with classmates and/or faculty members who listen to each student's individual experience, the ethical, political, theological, and pastoral questions evoked through this important educational immersion may or may not be pursued in subsequent communal conversation in seminary. In congregations, the learning process of those engaged in ministry with suffering people is also often confined to a small group of people and does not inform the larger educational ministry of the congregation or its social witness.

In their provocative book, Speaking of Dying: Recovering the Church's Voice in the Face of Death, the sister, father, and former seminary professor of a terminally ill pastor describe the experience of this pastor's "dying in the church" as "a train wreck. A disaster. An imposition. An unmentionable thing. The church only many years later is recovering its stability." (4) Curious if their experience was out of the ordinary, they conducted a study of ten churches (southern and midwestern U.S. congregations) which had experienced the terminal illness and death of their pastor. They discovered that avoidance, denial, and confusion were dominant themes--not mutual pain-bearing, theological learning, and witness. The authors assert that the church does better with death itself (rituals, supportive ministry at the time of death) than with dying.

Some connections apparently are being missed between meaningful personal experiences of ministry with the dying and bereaved and the capacity to help communities of faith engage these matters openly and in dialogue with Christian faith. Critiques of the church's uncertainty about how to speak about and accompany the dying, and the abdication of the church's historical role with the dying are gaining significant momentum. Speaking of Dying joins a growing body of literature in theological ethics and pastoral theology advocating the recovery of ars moriendi (the art of dying) in the church. (5)

This outpouring of literature, much of it within the last three to four years, reveals the relationship between the personal and the political, whether or not such a relationship is discussed in communities of faith. This literature explores what has been lost in "medicalized dying"; the relational costs for the dying and their families when care for the dying becomes the province of medical personnel rather than the communities in which the dying live. (6) Sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit in this literature is a more political and economic agenda that resides in this search for alternatives. Enormous demographic shifts are on the near horizon in the U.S., when by 2030 it is estimated that one out of every five people will be sixty-five years old or older. (7) There is growing concern about the economic sustainability of current medical practices and the challenges of caring for an aging population. Some writers use apocalyptic imagery to describe the impact of these demographic changes (physician Ira Byock warns that we are on the verge of a "perfect storm, a social tsunami of caregiving need" (8)).

As a pastoral care teacher, the interweaving of the personal and political in pastoral care practice is something I want students to be attentive to from the beginning of their exploration of pastoral care. I have often put one of Walter Brueggemann's assertions on the syllabi of pastoral care courses: "There are no personal issues that are not of a piece with the great public issues. To divide things up into the prophetic and pastoral is to betray both." (9)

As I immersed myself in this new "art of dying" literature, I realized afresh what an act of transgression it was when an LSTC faculty colleague (and dear friend to Phyllis and Herbert Anderson), Connie Kleingartner, chose to publicly acknowledge that she was dying of cancer.

Connie was diagnosed with an especially rare and aggressive form of breast cancer in the spring of 2007. Although she hoped to return to teaching in the fall of 2007, she recognized that she did not have the strength to do so and took a disability leave during the fall semester, while continuing to help out in ways that were manageable (e.g., guest speaking in classes, contributing to the work of the Tithing and Stewardship Foundation, and staying as active as possible in her home congregation). As Director of Field Education and Coordinator for Candidacy, Connie interacted with every LSTC student preparing for rostered ministry in the ELCA. Several students called to ask how they could support her. It was clear that the students wanted to do something, and they suggested a healing service prior to her surgery. It was moving to watch the students gather around Connie to lay hands on her and to pray, and even more moving when Connie removed her head scarf, so that the students could lay hands on her bald head. She was teaching us in those moments something about cherishing our vulnerable, embodied life; transgressing the notion that dignity or beauty are lost when our hair (or breast, or...) is lost.

As her illness progressed, Connie retained her interest in the world around her, paying attention not only to what was happening inside her but around her as well. When she underwent medical procedures and sat in waiting rooms, she observed differences in the ways patients were treated, even by medical personnel who attempted to display professional courtesy. She observed how particular kinds of health insurance made illness easier to bear, and at times heard the laments of those who did not have the means to pay for the medicine or procedure needed because it was not "covered." While grateful for the health insurance that brought the sense that she would always have the best care possible, she called attention to and expressed pain about a social order in which that same comfort was not available to so many. She saw her own struggle to live and recover as connected with others' longings and hopes.

In April 2008, Connie went to the doctor in the hope of returning to work in the fall of 2008, feeling surprising well and energetic, only to be informed that recent tests revealed further metastasis of the cancer and the end of treatment options, other than palliative measures. Again students and colleagues asked Connie what would be meaningful. It seemed that most of us were thinking of another healing service and anointing.

Connie's request was bolder, and somewhat disconcerting at first. Close to the end of an academic year when all the transition and farewell rituals were occurring, and believing that she would likely never be able to return when the seminary community re-gathered in fall 2008 for a new academic year, Connie asked to receive the Commendation of the Dying during one of the services held during the last week of school. She expressed the desire for the community's blessing am id a public worship service. She chose the hymn that would precede the commendation--"My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less" (ELW, 596). She asked her spiritual director to do the anointing.

LSTC's Augustana Chapel has a huge baptismal font--with a fountain flowing into a pool of water at the base--large enough to walk through the pool. Leaning on the arm of a colleague, Connie led over two hundred people (faculty and staff colleagues, supervising pastors in the field education program, former and present interns in the Chicago area, and students) through the chilly waters of the baptismal pool, as we sang these lines over and over:

I'm going on a journey, and I'm starting today.

My head is wet, and I'm on my way. Christ's mark is on me; it's on you, too; it says he loves me, and he loves you, too!

I'm becoming this day a saint of God.

It really doesn't matter what roads I trod. Wherever I go, God's been there, too.

God's love has touched me and will carry me through.

There are other saints who have said amen. They'll keep me faithful to my journey's end. Along the way I want to be the kind of person that God set free. (ELW 446)

Because of her weakened condition it took Connie a while to emerge from the pool and find a comfortable position on the far side, and when the next baptismal travelers emerged from the pool they came within inches of where she was standing at the waters edge. So it seemed natural to greet her with hugs and words of blessing (or gratitude, reconciliation, or tears). The singing and splashing continued as member after member of the community greeted Connie with words, hugs, and sometimes just tears.

As I stood watching this impromptu reception line, someone said to me, "I hope this doesn't mean that she is giving up." I realized in that moment that saying "I am dying" is an act of transgression. As Allen Verhey and others have described in the burgeoning ars moriendi literature, the amazing capacities of medicine to prolong life and to inspire hope for one more medical miracle have created deep unease about claiming the identity of a dying person rather than a sick person. It seems a betrayal of hope itself. It can also feel like a betrayal of faith in God--a God who works miracles for those who "never give up." It is also a transgression of the idea that to "give up," in dominant U.S. culture at least, is to commit the cardinal sin.

Treasuring

There is an old tale told of a wise woman who was traveling in the mountains. She found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry. The wise woman opened her bag to share her food and the hungry traveler saw the precious stone. He asked the woman to give it to him. Without hesitation, she handed him the stone. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone's worth, and he knew it would give him security for a lifetime. But, a few days later he went back in search of the old wise woman and returned the stone to her. "I've been thinking," he said. "I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone." (10)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

(Matt 6:21)

Five years before beginning to read the burgeoning literature on recovering ars moriendi and before I had adequate language to begin to describe the personal and public issues that are interwoven in that recovery, I was privileged to witness the transformative power of Connie's choice to "go public" with her dying as an invitation to treasure one another and, supported by the corporate worship of a community, to affirm shared trust in a God whose love took embodied form in Jesus and who meets us in the depths of our sorrow, fear, and dying.

In the public space of that service, looking at that holy, vulnerable face bowed to receive the commendation of the dying, I felt like the hungry traveler in the above folk tale: I had been offered something precious, and what I wanted most was what had enabled the giver to offer it--the "assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Heb 11:1), palpably present.

What I am trying to find words to describe seems best described by what Vitor Westhelle calls the "space between spaces," which is how he depicts eschatological events:

   And these are the two opposite and
   complementary sides of an eschatological
   event: lament and remembrance,
   condemnation and justification, grave
   and grace. The dividing line between
   these pairs, the threshold, cannot be
   defined, measured, or theologically
   located. In the moment that it is done,
   it is no longer here; it can only be lived
   through, experienced. (11)

This seems so true--the holiest moments are the hardest to convey; in trying to narrate them something is lost as well as retained. The mystery of trying to tell a story is to discover just how many ways there are to tell it--and that there are fragments of experience left on the cutting room floor in order to tell other parts. But these are the very moments I hope to experience in theological education, wherever it takes place--something of eschatological space; of holy ground that is traversed by a receptive, questioning, and discerning community; a humility deepened by the knowledge that people sharing significant events together will have multiple perspectives on them, correcting and enriching our own. (12) These are moments to be treasured.

Two particular convictions about educating for ministry were strengthened by the experience of Connie's choice to make her dying public. One is that transformative theological education, wherever it occurs, helps us transgress conventional boundaries that rigidly separate private from public life. Allen Verhey tells the story of how his friends had expressed alarm when he told them he was writing a book about dying. Since Verhey was himself living with a life-threatening illness, his friends expressed alarm that he might be writing a memoir. He assured them that such was not the case, but wrote that the book began as a conversation with himself as both a theologian and a mortal, who "became a better theologian by listening to [his] mortal self" and who "knows that he will die and who believes that the last word belongs to God...." (13) In a small footnote he says, "It may be, however, that memoirs are the ArsMoriendi for our time. The success of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture is evidence that people are still looking for models and paradigms for dying well." (14)

Perhaps memoirs of dying, like Connie's embodied dying journey lived in our midst, are inspiring because by inviting us into the pathos and meaning-making of their lives, revealing what is most sacred and treasured, those who "come near" to these narratives are profoundly faced with the questions of what we ourselves most deeply trust and treasure. Reading memoirs and interviewing people who are living with dying and grieving are core educational commitments of many courses on caring for the dying and bereaved, together with the practice of speaking with one another about the deaths we imagine for ourselves. As a student observed after hearing the diversity of others' very different hopes about how they would die, it is important to see one another's hopes and fears in the light of larger narratives of meaning.

There is a book I always require in any course I teach about dying and bereavement--Karla FC Holloway's Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. (15) This social history of death and grief spans the twentieth century historical experiences of African Americans with death and mourning, setting what is so deeply personal into a communal narrative comprised of key events and social practices. Holloway calls it "A Memorial," and a personal loss is present in its pages, but the memorial is to the many as well as the one--it is a memorial to a people as well as a person. Most white students who read this book are deeply shaken, and many ask, "Why didn't anyone ever tell us these stories?" For African American students, the book brings a story of profound anguish and resilience to public voice, evoking memories and stories not often uttered in classrooms where white students and teachers are in the majority. Educating for ministry offers a place for the telling of such stories, and the space to wrestle with them, so that leaders in ministry may develop the abilities to transgress the many silences that exist within us and among us.

Second, while the classroom offers us the opportunity to develop planned activities and processes for transgressing silence about matters that are difficult to raise (our own mortality and our difficulty in helping communities grapple with dying and death in the light of Christian faith is only one of them--but perhaps one of the most important), Connie's story offers the reminder that some of the most profound opportunities for learning come from unexpected and unplanned events and challenges that communities face together. Leadership for any form of ministry is perhaps most tested in those unexpected places, where--to come full circle--who we are, what we do, and how we do it, teaches more than what we tell people. Everything we do is a form of teaching. I give thanks for all the teachers who have embodied that truth. Connie was surely one. And so is Phyllis Anderson.

Kathleen D. Billman

John H. Tietjen

Professor of Pastoral Ministry: Pastoral Theology, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

(1.) See Herbert E. Anderson's essay, "Honoring Phyllis Anderson," page 230 of this issue of Currents in Theology and Mission.

(2.) Fred Craddock, Dale Goldsmith, and Joy V. Goldsmith, Speaking of Dying: Recovering the Church's Voice in the Face of Death (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012), 23. For an eloquent description of the relationship between story and dying see Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 97-122.

(3.) bell hooks (who does not capitalize her name), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 207.

(4.) Speaking of Dying, 1.

(5.) See also John Swinton and Richard Payne, eds., Living Well and Dying Faithfully: Christian Practices for End of Life Care (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Mary Ellen O'Brien, Living Well & Dying Well: A Sacramental View of Life and Death (Chicago: Sheed & Ward, 2001); Rob Moll, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2010); Abigail Rian Evan, Is God Still at the Bedside? The Medical, Ethical, and Pastoral Issues of Death and Dying (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). Karen Speerstra and Herbert Anderson, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying (Divine Arts: an imprint of Michael Wiese Publications), forthcoming in 2014.

(6.) Allen Verhey has described "medicalized dying" as a historical process that has fueled enormous hope in the power of medicine and technology to save people from death, led to the majority of people in the U.S. dying in hospitals, and the loss of the "dying role," which has been replaced by the "sick role." The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from. Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 11-23. Three responses to medicalized dying now come from bioethics and the movement for patient rights, the death awareness movement inspired by the work of Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, and the hospice movement (41-67).

(7.) Susan H. McFadden and John T. McFadden, Aging Together: Dementia, Friendship, and Flourishing Communities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 7.

(8.) Ira Byock, The Four Things That Matter Most (New York: Free Press, 2004), 215.

(9.) Walter Brueggemann, The Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 18.

(10.) From "A Living Stone," sermon by Candace Chellew-Hodge for the fifth Sunday of Easter, in The Minister's Annual Manual for Preaching and Worship, 2013-2014, ed. John Indermark (Inver Grove Heights, Minn.: Logos Productions Inc., 2013), 349.

(11.) Vitor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology, Past and Present (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 137.

(12.) Kathleen D. Billman, "Classrooms and Choratic Spaces: A Meditation on Seminary Teaching," in Mary Philip, John Arthur Nunes, and Charles M. Collier, Churrasco: A Theological Feast in Honor of Vitor Westhelle (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 150-159.

(13.) The Christian Art of Dying, 7. Verhey died of his illness on February 16, 2014, three years after the publication of his book.

(14.) Ibid.

(15.) Karla FC Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).