“EMBRACING LIFE, ENGAGING DEATH”

A Preface

I was planning on sending you Part IV of the initial H&H reflections today but I’d like to take a temporary (though related) detour, especially given today is the Feast of All Saints and tomorrow, November 2, is typically the Feast of All Souls.

Yesterday I received word from a friend and former colleague that Sr. Jeanette Wasinger died on October 22nd.

During my years at the Center for Spiritual Development Jeanette Wasinger was a Pastoral Care Associate at the Regina Residence, the skilled care facility for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange from 2004-2009. I didn’t know Jeanette well. She had come to a day-long workshop I led on poetry and prayer. She knew of and had been very kind and supportive of the work I was doing in the Art of Spiritual Direction Program and in The Human & the Holy community. Mostly, we just shared occasional brief conversations in passing. Only later, after Jeanette was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and returned home to her Motherhouse in Kansas did we develop a unique friendship and this only via regularly irregular emails.

Because we are focusing on Embracing Life, Engaging Death this year and the mutually enhancing and transformative relationship between living well and dying well, I’d like to share with you a reflection I wrote concerning Jeanette for The Almond Tree in January of 2010. Interestingly, our theme that year was Practicing Resurrection. I’d also like to share some of Jeanette’s own words from two of her emails to me before her death, as well as some quotes of Jeanette’s used in her eulogy. Knowing her generous spirit, I believe she would welcome me passing them on to anyone I thought might benefit from them. They are the words of a woman who lived fully, faced her death bravely, and lived her life as a friend of God — Elizabeth Johnson’s description of a saint..

● from THE ALMOND TREE, January 1 – 4, 2010

Prayer Engages Us in Reality

I have always agreed with the Anglican priest and theologian Kenneth Leech who writes that an authentic spirituality is one that necessarily points people in the direction of reality and equips them in some way to move consciously and faithfully in that direction. We live in a culture that is almost pathologically designed to steer us away from reality, away from the big questions and lurking dangers within which meaning and maturity reside. Religion, as embodied in our ecclesial communities, is also guilty of perpetuating the same harmful avoidance. Here the evasion is more pronounced, inexcusable, and unfortunate. Religion too often serves to help persons in one way or another to dodge reality either by packaging and peddling easy answers to ineffable questions, by warding off the dangers (or if you prefer demons) inherent in any awakened, mature spiritual quest, or by refusing to let go of certain aspects of unquestioned codes and inherited heirlooms that each religious tradition has that do not resonate with our lived experience, connect us to the mystery, or truly enliven.

Prayer is an essential dimension of authentic spirituality and so must be authentic itself. Mature prayer always directly or indirectly guides us toward facing and engaging in reality. This is what makes it both human and holy. Anything that is called prayer that helps people, personally or communally, to minimize, avoid, flee, reject, varnish, or cosmeticize reality is a poor imitation and an affront to the prayer of Jesus whose prayer was always an intentional act of engagement with the existential and historical situations which confronted him.

The other day I was blessed by an experience of authentic communal prayer. I am still recovering from it (or hoping that I don’t). The liturgy was as powerful as it was understated. There were no bells and whistles, no flash, no platitudes that pain more than comfort. We didn’t gather in a chapel or church but in the room where the sisters normally gather for their meals. The circumstance that quickly brought us together was the news that one of the pastoral caregivers to the sisters at the Regina Community, Jeanette Wasinger, herself a sister from a Midwest community– had been diagnosed with stage 4 metastasized lung cancer. We were gathering to bless her, to acknowledge that she has blessed us by her wisdom and compassionate presence, to anoint her with oil, to say goodbye, and to pledge our care for her as she returned home to her community and as she took (in her words) the next steps in her dance with and toward God.

What moved me the most, what seemed so pronounced despite being so simple was the sheer honesty – the honesty of why we were there, the honesty of the prayers that expressed both love and sadness, the truthfulness only symbols like fragrant oil and touch can convey, and especially the candor of the woman herself who so nobly spoke of the shock and the all-too-real struggle and suffering that lay ahead for her.

Again, it wasn’t so much [Jeanette’s] composure that moved me as it was her courage — expressed in simple straightforward words — to face directly in our presence and on our behalf the unvarnished reality of her situation. The Franciscan Regis Duffy asserts that, if we consciously or unconsciously assign a magical understanding of the anointing of the sick to some ninth inning attempt to save people from the fires of hell or a last ditch effort to wipe away a lifetime of misdeeds, we miss a fundamental reason for anointing people who are gravely ill: that is, to give them the courage to face into death and to die well, to give them the strength to offer their lives as an example to the rest of the community of how to die in faith (and here we have to be careful that this doesn’t translate into a caricature of saccharin peacefulness or the association of integrity or bravery with a stiff upper lip). Dying honestly is perhaps our final and most fecund prayer.

When we come together like this, I thought, when we gather this honestly, this frightened, this hopefully, exposed to the unknown, vulnerable to the sadness, open to the love that permeates this room, and bring the maddening mystery of it all to the Mystery that connects us one to another – then and there the Christian community is being who it is called to be.

╬ djm

● From Jeanette on December 17, 2013:

Dear Dan,

You are thoughtful to stay connected with me. It means a lot to me . . . . Thank you. . . .

I left Regina Residence and Orange in December, 2009. As you know, I was given a short time to live without treatment and my prognosis was so dire I did not want treatment — only quality of life. So, here I am in December, 2013 — dressed and with shoes on and dancing in the present moment (See Jeanette’s poem below). Cancer has been “a sacred guest” for me. Now I feel like I have one foot on Mother Earth and the other suspended in space and ready to take the next step. It is all neutral to me — and I could go either way today. I’ve decided that there must be some “fine tuning” I need to do before my final breath. I have been so ready to go, that I find myself weary not to take the plunge into God. But, I must do it with LIFE, and I do choose to live! Death could be an escape, and that’s why I find your questions so appropriate.

I still have the article you wrote and sent out to the H & H family after the prayer service at Regina. You wrote it so beautifully, and it was a sacred experience for me, too.

So, Dan, I’ll sign off with gratitude for the connection of our lives. We are ONE. I am grateful and I wish you HOPE, PEACE and I send my prayer—

With love,
Jeanette

● From Jeanette on September 11, 2014:

Dear Dan,

My correspondence is limited these days, but I appreciate your connection so much that I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to greet you. . . . I hope all is going well with you, Dan. . . .

My health has changed greatly in the last year. It has really diminished in the last few months. I am grateful for Hospice care, as you can imagine. . . . I am surrounded by wonderful community friends and others, like you, who have stayed in touch. The employees here are also very attentive and special. I can’t think of a thing to complain about. I am so grateful to be up and around . . . . Today I turned in the keys to the car that was given to me to drive. . . .

I wish you all good gifts, Dan. I am grateful to have met you . . . . I’ve been enriched by you, your writing and this simple, but dear, relationship.

I’m not sure if I coined this or if I received it from Ira Progoff while working with him for several years, but I think it might be my invention. “DEATH IS A SOLITARY ACT THAT YOU CANNOT DO ALONE.” I have been committed to the topic of death and dying over the years. Now I am immersed in DOING it. It is simple, yet complex. SURRENDER is the great design for it. I just think I have surrendered everything and then one more thing comes along to embrace or to let go of!

Release of pain with medication turns to exhaustion, so I say there are “trade-offs.” Do I want to suffer pain or can I live with exhaustion to the point of not being able to engage with others? That is my hope— to stay in relationship with others on this journey. Many things make that more and more difficult, and there are days when I just sit in the comfortable recliner in my room— AND BE!!! There are other days when I groan and even laugh at myself.

It is difficult to explain the process but recently I read a chapter of Ron Rolheiser’s book. He approaches the topic of dying, and I knew immediately that he is not dying. He is beautifully ruminating about the process. DYING is difficult to describe and one can only describe it as one is on the launching pad waiting for the next step. I am so ready to take the great leap. I was so ready in December, 2009, and found that the medical profession does [not] allow the body to dismiss easily or simply. I have done my best to take that approach, however.

I will close with a poem that I just found today. It was part of Nancy Schreck, OSF’s Keynote address at the recent LCWR conference.1 It was written by Jean Meier, csj, who was a contemporary leader on the St. Louis Provincial Team who died suddenly in May.

“Risky business
this surfing on grace
I do not know if I will be carried
on a powerful swell
or too conscious of self
will lose myself in the wake.
What I do know
is that even though swept under
I will emerge
perhaps bruised and breathless
to find grace afloat
ready to carry me
safely home.”

Thank you for your faithful friendship, Dan. There are people in life who become friends with precious little contact. I think that is the gift given to Dan Miller and Jeanette Wasinger.

Lovingly,
Jeanette

In the eulogy offered for Jeanette—the following quotes and poem of Jeanette’s were included. I find them especially provocative and evidence of Jeanette’s faithfulness, love, and wisdom:

● “I feel drawn to inclusive love, simplicity and the mission of unity.”

● “I had often wondered how I would move from this life to the next. What would take me there? Who would companion me? How would I be in the process?”

● “My awareness of beauty and goodness is heightened. I have no enemies and no unfinished business. I am grateful to everyone, and I feel great companionship. I find myself filled with love. It has been a time of abundant grace…. If cancer can be called ‘a gift’ I have received it. In the spirit of nonviolence, I do not ‘fight’ it. I call cancer my ‘sacred guest’ and I live my life as fully as I can.”

In December 2007 at a workshop titled “Death’s Mystery, Life’s Meaning” Jeanette, with some mysterious prescience, wrote a poem that . . . .she sent. . . . to Sister Mary Lou Roberts with this note: “If someone decides to integrate it (the poem) into my eulogy or Mass, that would be fine. Thank you.”

Death Song

Come! O freedom,
my long desired friend.
I’ve passed you by so often.
Now I welcome you to take charge.
Free me of all burdens of life,
invited and uninvited,
that I have experienced.

Come! Dancing God
Mystery
Presence
Lover.
Sweep me off my feet into eternity.

Come! Friends, family, community and world.
Be with me now
as we have been one in enjoying life and
in our pain of misunderstanding,
conflict, fear and rejection.
Our dance of oneness is now
forgiveness, joy, delight and
lightheartedness.

Come! Death. I trust you
as much as I have trusted life.
Now come and sweep me into
your mystery♦

~ Let us rejoice together in a life and death well-lived and in the knowledge that Jeanette is dancing with God.

1 LCWR stand for Leadership Conference of Women Religious. SEE their website here.
See the full eulogy for Jeanette Wasinger here.