Rendering Incarnation Across the Years

"Be selfish, Lisa," I read, confused again for the first time. I was sitting in a conference plenary lecture, multitasking as usual. The speaker entertained, inspired, taught, but somehow, not for me. The old journal from long ago had whispered to me from my bag. I pulled it out with attempt to be nonchalant, inoffensive. It was for my writing class, to start that night. On a whim, I had decided perhaps it was time to continue writing in it. A bound leather journal, with gild-edged pages and wide-spaced lines on which to write. My handwriting spoke the year easily—1998. Back then, I had moved from printing in all capital letters into a tentative cursive script, feeling my way slowly into a more gentle, embodied flow of life. So my own script read back to me, “Be selfish, Lisa.” I knew to trust what I had written, but I had no recollection of what was there on the page in front of me.

Allow me to introduce you to my Ed Sullivan. I call him ‘mine’ mostly to say he’s not the famous comedian of old, Ed Sullivan, but a Hospice patient with whom I met four times in our second incarnation. We had apparently met once before, a first incarnation of our companionship, when I had served as a hospital intern in the heart ward of a local hospital. I don’t count that time. He had apparently been one of many that year and I had not been as mindful as I should have been to remember him. No, Ed became Ed for me when I moved into my Hospice internship, calling a stranger-patient on my list to schedule a home-visit. “Is this Ed Sullivan?” I asked over the phone. “This is Lisa, the Hospice chaplain.” “Hi, Lisa,” I heard. “It’s so good to hear from you again.” “Again?” I asked. “Yes, you met with me once, a year ago, in St. Mary’s hospital.” I had moved institutions, changed jobs, been given a home number I had never had before, and still been recognized. He recognized my voice, he said, on the phone.

In my journal’s recollection, we met a total of four times. I’m not sure whether our erotic-but-chaste love began at the phone call or sometime amidst the four visits and one phone call, but that’s what happened. I fell in love with him mind, soul, spirit and body. His death, predetermined though it was by the definition of Hospice, devastated me. The 1998 journal was a preliminary attempt to grieve through prose, to rail at the universe for bringing such a holy beloved into my life and then ripping him away again. 

I had begun the journal of grief with a question, “What does the communion of saints signify…?”, which is how any fledgling theologian would attempt to process her grief. One theologian taught me a highbrow answer. She said it “signifies the relationship flowing among an intergenerational company of persons profoundly touched by the sacred, sharing in the cosmic community of life which is also sacred. Ultimately,” this author argues, “it points to the Creator Spirit who vivifies creation, weaves interconnections, and makes holy the world.” Elizabeth Johnson, whose words these are, names this communion a “circle of companions by the power of Spirit-Sophia.” My prose throughout the journal entries then moves deeper to describe a short companionship with Ed or “Sully,” as he was called, begun September 30^th, 1998. 

Perhaps not as short as I had supposed.

Ed was from Newtown Pennsylvania, and celebrated his 38^th year of marriage to a lovely woman, Mary, about three weeks before he died. They had had three sons, reared true to Irish-Catholic roots. He had lung cancer, congestive pulmonary disorder, both probably from his many years as a smoker, which accompanied his decades of alcoholism. He’d been dry for over 20 years but spoke easily of his regrets, the turmoil that his addiction had inflicted on those he loved most. I found out much later that in his AA meeting, he was a weighty elder, a demanding sponsor and excruciating truth-teller for those on the path to long-term sobriety. “You were Ed’s Hospice chaplain?!” a colleague in ministry asked me, with a tone of awe or fear, I couldn’t tell which. “I would have died if I’d had to do that.” She was part of his AA meeting.

His words to me, recollected in my script, came from the last time that I ever saw him, on the fourth visit to his home. I had planned on visiting patients on the other side of town, but changed my plans at the last minute. I called to set up a visit, and Ed whispered into the phone that he would welcome me. He had COPD and was on oxygen, after all. I then had intentions for our time together—some Scripture, perhaps a bit of singing for him, if he couldn’t speak much—but those got interrupted by the local parish’s Eucharistic ministers coming to his house. “Interrupted” only in my own mind, of course. The sacramental setting, shared in a larger web of relationship, contextualized all of what Ed and I shared together. My hand-written words then recreate a long-forgotten scene. “As I left this time,” I wrote, “(Ed) said, ‘Be selfish, Lisa.’ Confused, I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘You have a gift and if you say yes to too many, you won’t be able to share it. Be selfish.’”

Dumbfounded was the word I used to describe my reaction then. It works pretty well to describe my re-receiving the words nearly fifteen years later. I interpreted it then within my original intention to visit patients on the other side of town that morning, plans changed to visit with him in what was to be the last time. I had decided to narrow my efforts to fewer patients to visit per day. This time, fifteen years later, his words overwhelmed me in the plenary lecture, surrounded by people but isolated by circumstance, even un-seeing choice. Tears flowed easily, beginning in the throat but moving more deeply and quickly in awareness, both coming from my core, my gut. “Be selfish, Lisa. You have a gift and if you say yes to too many, you won’t be able to share it.” I received something sensate, aligned, generous and risky.  But what? I shrugged it off, put the journal away. Really. Didn't give it another thought.

Yet within twenty-four hours of this last “hearing,” my work life changed in tectonic ways—clearly by my willingness and choice, but almost without effort or realized intention. A dissonance and weight I had carried for months was lifted as my life moved into an alignment I had only intuited but could not see. Way opened for narrowing my work energies and expanding the ways I can be present out of my strengths, not out of others’ needs. Something in me heard him, across the years, and I became selfish enough to honor what it is that I have to offer in abundance.

Whatever that may be. I’m not sure what that gift is that Ed saw so clearly. I don’t think I actually need to know how to articulate it or describe it. I do need to offer it, however, to be willing to steward my unknowing, allow it to flow through me, and as it does, align me with who I know I am being asked to be, in my gut, at my core. The flow comes through in what I am coming to learn, to know, to write as “a companionable way,” which I never connected to Ed, for some reason. In terms I’ve used before, he’s an “absent antecedent” I had not known in such fashion. The anam cara ring that has coursed with such significance in my life these last years? I got it to signify him, I re-learn from my journal. His Irish-Catholic impishness had come to mind while browsing in the Celtic shop in town after he died; I seized on the connection. When my parents asked what I might want for Christmas, I told them “that ring.” How could I have forgotten its origin in the time of grief after Ed’s death?

And it wasn’t all in my head either. We met each other a total of five times, and when I left that last day, he expressed his love for me, unbidden and startling. I told him I loved him too, because I did. The section of the journal concludes, “I remember being in my car, waiting at a light and thinking, ‘I’m in love with another man…’ How would my boyfriend (of the time) hear that? Two loves, so different, yet both so intense.” I loved him, deeply, even still. I can feel it, at my core.

The pragmatic side of me pulls me out of my gut and into my head… Who was this man anyway? I don’t even know his sons' names, let alone anything substantive about him, like what he did for a living, what a bastard he must have been when he was drinking, what kind of faith enlivened him as an Irish Catholic. Like those were the point for either of us. He recognized my voice, on the phone. He saw me in ways I could not, ways I yearned to be seen. He shaped my life in ways I had forgotten, opening doors I had not remembered. And his words awakened me once again, precisely when I needed to stir to life in faith again.

Incarnation is like that, I guess, whatever its rendition.