Pop 89: New Light on Old Prayers
By Madonna Hamel
Pulling out of my sister’s driveway in Medicine Hat, I am on the last leg of my journey home from a sojourn on Cortes island with my brother who suffered a stroke two months ago. It’s taken two and half days to get from Cortes Island Island to the TransCanada headed East to Highway 4, the actual last leg of my journey.
Finally, all my tense muscles ease under the rays of perfect prairie light beaming down from generous clouds and the road empties to just me and the occasional truck loaded with hay bales. I know the real journey ends when I breathe my last breath. But even then, I’m not so sure. Something tells me we move on to a place where the chaos of our lives gets clarified, the lessons become evident.
But I don’t need to court ideas of death to appreciate the lessons from these past momentous months. We have, as siblings, stepped out of our habitual spaces and been thrown into a kind of unending nerve-jangling excruciatingly beautiful, and at the same time, frighteningly dark, reality. And through it all we have managed to to become better people for it. Certainly, we are closer to each other.
Thoughts of dying were on my mind before this crisis. In fact, I had just finished reading Pema Chodron’s book, “How We Live Is How We Die.” The book is a buddhist nun’s perspective on sewing good habits of living, so that when it comes time to cast off our mortal coil we won’t be shocked or appalled. There is a freedom in preparing for endings by accepting the little endings we come up against every day. With every beginning and ending of an assignment, a chore, a day, I am never sure what comes next. The thought of a completely blank slate can at times be terrifying, but can also feel freeing, knowing I can start over, try again.
Even the scientists have encoring words. Reading books by neurosurgeons I choose to heed those who consider the very possible chance that dying could simply be the threshold between one form of consciousness and another. Not an ending; just a transition. Not something to fear at all.
Over the Christmas season I included in this column some of the writings in an Advent anthology called “Watch for the Light”, of which I’ve become hugely fond. When packing on the fly for Cortes I threw into my knapsack the Lenten and Easter companion called “Bread and Wine.” I appreciate it for it’s poetic and hence universal approach to the meaning of leaving darkness, entering springtime, turning away from all that is messed up within us and the world, and looking again and again to what is redeemable, encouraging, and yes, hopeful.
However, the thing about Lenten readings is there’s that whole cruxifixction bit. You have to drag your cross through a lot of wretchedness and pain before the resurrection. We arrived at the Campbell River hospital in sleet and growing darkness. Our brother lay, patched up and woozy, but tearfully happy to see us. We talked and talked and talked and the nurses kindly ignored us late into the night. As Dougie finally began drifting off he asked me to read to him. I had my anthology with me and began flipping through the readings with the vigilance of a mom censoring the scary bits out of a fairy tale bedtime story.
I skipped straight to the last section of the book: New Life and I found the three loyal women waiting at the cave entrance. The essay was called “An Invitation”, was by Joyce Hollyday, a former peace activist who said recently: “In an age of intolerance, compassion can be dangerous.” I noted the similarity between us three sisters standing around my brother’s bedside and the women at the cave. As my brother drifted off I read these lines: “the women knew they could not both believe and fear.” They would have to choose between the two. She quoted I John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect fear casts out fear.”
We three walked along the water that night, sucking in the ocean air the three miles from the hospital to the hotel. It would be the beginning of the hardest test I ever took: putting love before fear. I failed many times.
Raised Catholic, I left the church in my thirties and explored the world of yoga, Buddhism, Sufism, Judaism and Indigenous spirituality, only to return for another look around, thanks to my exposure to a kind of “folk devotion” I witnessed in Quebec. Tentative but willing, I began an honest inventory of the nurturing aspects parts of my childhood religion.
One phrase that popped up recently comes from a popular hit of the 70s, Desiderata: “Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in times of sudden misfortune.” It strikes me how no amount of spiritual knowledge is up to the task of protecting me from a psychic debacle if it’s not actually put into practise.
But what humbled and thrilled me even more was how deep the old prayers burrowed into our hearts and how they surfaced with a kind of childlike trust and a miraculous tenderness we often forget is there. A decade can mean ten years time. But, we Catholics know of another decade- the ten beads linking the Mysteries on Mary’s rosary. Walking along the Saskatchewan River, flying over the western provinces, driving to and from doctors appointments, poking the fire late at night after tucking Doug in at night, we prayed decades.
The mother within us is not afraid of silence nor our fear, models an impossible, difficult compassion. And while, this time round, we siblings wanted to skip over that line: “now, and at the hour of my death”, we prayed, knowing Love is both the fuel and the destination of this life journey. Without it, the light never comes.