Entry for 22 April , 2011:
Good Friday and Easter Monday are “bank holidays” in Scotland and the UK, making a four-day weekend, a time for family gatherings, driving places or just hanging out. Not that many people go to church anymore, so it’s more of a secular than a religious holiday for most.
After a late night out, got of up late this morning. Brisk start to a lovely Scottish Spring day: Ran 100% of my standard canal-river kelvin 5k+ course today for the first time since my surgery last September. Time 30:26. It's taken me months to carefully work up to this, but it feels good to finally be there.
Then a quick late breakfast and a walk down Great Western Road: Trees in blossom, pink and white, just starting to leaf out. People out in droves, many in short sleeves, enjoying the sun and 15C Good Friday weather, in a festive mood, almost bemused to be out on a nice day, without work or Saturday errands.
Our destination: St Mary's 3-hr Good Friday Devotions service, filled with moving readings and sermons and powerful music. I'm left with Peter Jones' modern Hebraic-flavored version of the ancient Good Friday Reproaches ("O my people, what have I done to you? How have I hurt you?") stuck in my head. Also: Graham Maule's hymn setting of Isaiah to Burns's Ae Fond Kiss ("Who would ever have believed it?") brought tears; Cedric's sermon observations on Pontius Pilate and the muddled (mis)use of power: and Kelvin's poetic, poignant story of a sale bin spotted in Camden Market: "Gods: 3 for £5", and his invocation of the Buddha's "Life is suffering" as an appropriate commentary for Good Friday. (If you're interested, check his blog: http://www.thurible.net/20110422/good-friday-2011-devotional-address/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thurible+%28thurible.net%29&utm_content=Google+UK)
An emotionally draining experience, which has left me finally ready for Easter.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Emotion-Focused Therapy: Level 2 Workshop Series for 2011-12
Facilitated by Robert Elliott
Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde
Saturdays, 9.30-16.30, 15 October 2011 – 19 May 2012
Sir Henry Wood Building,
Jordanhill Campus, University Of Strathclyde
(Sponsored by HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange,
University of Strathclyde)
The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is offering further training in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) for counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level One training in EFT or the equivalent. This series has been restructured from its previous evening format and will now meet on seven Saturdays throughout the 2011-12 academic year, beginning in October. The format will be a mixture of brief lectures, videos or demonstrations, experiential practice exercises in small groups, supervision of cases seen by course members, and discussion.
The specific topics to be covered will feature material not covered in the Level 1 course, including
• Therapist experiential response modes
• Client modes of engagement
• Narrative Retelling of difficult/traumatic experiences
• Relational Dialogue for Alliance difficulties
• Creation of Meaning for meaning protests
In addition, the Focusing and different forms of Chairwork will be particularly emphasized:
• Focusing with difficult or painful experiences
• Clearing a Space for overwhelming or chaotic experiences
• Two chair enactment for Self-interruption splits
• Two chair conflict split work for depression, anxiety and self-harm behaviour
• Compassionate Self-soothing for painful self states
• Empty chair work for unfinished business
This series is scheduled for the following dates:
Autumn 2011:
15 October
26 November
Winter-Spring 2012:
14 January
18 February
24 March
21 April
19 May
• Enrolment is set for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20.
• Course fee: Until 1 Oct: £395; after 1 Oct: £445. Please send a non-returnable deposit of £50.00 to secure a place if not paying the whole fee at time of booking.
• The course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.
Please direct enquiries and requests for applications to HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange, Jan Bissett (jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk, 0141 548 3418).
Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde
Saturdays, 9.30-16.30, 15 October 2011 – 19 May 2012
Sir Henry Wood Building,
Jordanhill Campus, University Of Strathclyde
(Sponsored by HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange,
University of Strathclyde)
The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is offering further training in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) for counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level One training in EFT or the equivalent. This series has been restructured from its previous evening format and will now meet on seven Saturdays throughout the 2011-12 academic year, beginning in October. The format will be a mixture of brief lectures, videos or demonstrations, experiential practice exercises in small groups, supervision of cases seen by course members, and discussion.
The specific topics to be covered will feature material not covered in the Level 1 course, including
• Therapist experiential response modes
• Client modes of engagement
• Narrative Retelling of difficult/traumatic experiences
• Relational Dialogue for Alliance difficulties
• Creation of Meaning for meaning protests
In addition, the Focusing and different forms of Chairwork will be particularly emphasized:
• Focusing with difficult or painful experiences
• Clearing a Space for overwhelming or chaotic experiences
• Two chair enactment for Self-interruption splits
• Two chair conflict split work for depression, anxiety and self-harm behaviour
• Compassionate Self-soothing for painful self states
• Empty chair work for unfinished business
This series is scheduled for the following dates:
Autumn 2011:
15 October
26 November
Winter-Spring 2012:
14 January
18 February
24 March
21 April
19 May
• Enrolment is set for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20.
• Course fee: Until 1 Oct: £395; after 1 Oct: £445. Please send a non-returnable deposit of £50.00 to secure a place if not paying the whole fee at time of booking.
• The course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.
Please direct enquiries and requests for applications to HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange, Jan Bissett (jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk, 0141 548 3418).
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Soft Flows the Stream, As Stars Upon the Sea are Pearls
In memorium, Margaret Linstrom Weitzel, 1950 – 2011:
Background: When I was in Toledo in early January, I went up to my study and found a couple of folders, one with letters from Margaret from 1967-1969, saved all these years, and the other of poems from the same time, including a couple held together with a rusty paper clip and a 4 X 6 index card (possibly left over from high school debate?) on which I’d written “early Margaret poems”. At first it felt a bit painful to read them: They seemed full of unnecessary obscurity, when what I really wanted to say was that I really respected her as a person.
But there they were, and I couldn’t not read them. What I can’t remember now is whether in fact I ever presented any of them to her. The references in the middle section of the main one (“The Turning”) make me think that I must have written this for her 17th birthday, not long after I got back from my family’s long trek to Alaska in the summer of 1967. In reading through it, I was struck by how parts of the poem seemed to prefigure things that happened later.
So a couple of weeks before she died I sent the poem to her in an email together with some of this explanatory material before and after. I knew that she didn’t have long to live, so it was my good-bye to her. Now that she is gone, it seems to apply to her present situation, on her journey from this life to whatever is next. No one knows what this is, but sometimes we get inklings. My mom has since had a vision of her in a white room filled with light, being healed and ministered to by those who came before her. That makes sense to me. However, my vision of her is a bit different: We know that she was excited about the prospect of discovering what was next for her. For me, it feels as though she has at last begun the voyage described in a poem I wrote for her in 1967. Looking at this poem from the other end of my life, in the wake of Margaret’s passing, I wonder what it will be like for me to take the same journey that she has now begun.
The title is a complicated and fairly obscure play on her name. Since this, I’ve a done lot with this kind of etymological-metaphoric approach over the years, in other poems but also in a series of articles I published. Much of the meaning of the poem eluded me at first, but as I went through I started adding a few annotations in brackets, and that helped.
Soft Flows the Stream, As Stars upon the Sea are Pearls
Soft flows the stream:
See the humble coracle,
[a small skin boat used by medieval Irish monks;
I suspect that this is supposed to represent Margaret]
Riding the waters in silence.
Leaving the flowery leas,
One cast eyes upon
The crystal crucifix
And you saw a single Pearl
Amid the last brilliant flashes
Of the setting sun’s
Last beam.
Came the insect
[I don’t know exactly why, but I think I’m referring to myself]
As the coracle reached the sea,
Scratching to be seen.
Brendan smiled,
[a reference to the famous sea-faring medieval Irish saint,
15 years before we looked at our new born first child
and realized that this was his name;
here I think he’s meant to symbolize the Spiritual generally:
God, Jesus, Buddha]
Transfiguring the insect:
A guilty cloud of smoke,
Expanding supernova cloud,
Took the disembodied journey.
A turn in the starsea path
Brought the dolphin
[I think this and the previous bit are talking
about reincarnation, which means that the dolphin
is also me, a much nicer image, I think…]
Beside her [the coracle’s] rounded bow.
The saint smiles
But she is free –
You are free, and
The dolphin desires
Only the Koinonia.
Seeing visions of islands
In the west;
[In Celtic mythology, the land of Faerie,
where we go when we die, is in the West; that is, Heaven]
Promises to find and keep
Where the sea is the table
For all such things;
[The image of the Communion Table
comes to me now as I read this]
Where grace is the way
To lead all things;
The dolphin will not
Force the course;
Two wakes meet
And mix between.
[Thirty-nine years later, in 2006,
I would use a similar image in the poem I wrote
for Brendan and Mayumi’s wedding.]
[I’ve skipped a dark and somewhat muddled part here; then we come to the middle section of the poem, which I apparently later pulled out as a separate poem, called:]
The Turning
Times change
Refining todays, melting
All the layered yesterdays.
[McArthur Park is melting in the rain, anyone?]
Smile upon the changes good
Mark well all changes evil…
Time and changes will not cease;
Perhaps, soon a bit more evil
Then more good.
But of time there is
No real knowing
Time is not the seeming
Nor we. The
Counting of years increases:
Years are so arbitrary
Yet their turning marks with
Symbolic pageantry
The growth, the changes within.
Within the changes:
Symbolic initiation
The turning of the stair…
O do not despair
The length of the journey:
The island you chose as destiny
Is fair but far;
Others may rest sooner
But the gain and glory
Will be yours.
[I’ve skipped a section here that seems to go on too long about storms and things, then we get to the last section:]
… Until the storm fades
To gentle breeze,
Soft stream from fragrant
Flowery leas borne on
The smell of salt,
And the humble coracle
Nears the island [of the Blessed]
So far to journey
So long from Eire [Ireland],
Genesis of journey,
And the memory
Of home sings of childhood
And hope,
While the tide comes in,
While time passes beyond years
Marked with circumstance,
To mean another branch has grown,
Another step is taken up the beach.
And the vision of dawn shimmers
Wherever your eyes gaze,
Shining prophecies of the promise
Into the sea,
And the blessings of an advocate
[1 John 2:1]
Emanate from the Cross
Of crystal and the Pearl:
Keeping company
With the coracle, with you,
With the Saint’s unseen presence,
With the dolphin:
Rippling stars upon the sea
Glitter to open eyes,
Pearls set upon the swirling sky
In the hours
Before Dawn.
Further reflections from 2011: As I worked my way back into this poem after all these years, it felt like a form of time travel, like Proust and the madeleine cookie in Remembrance of Times Past: The essential meanings and feelings of it came back to me, now reflected calmly and without the pain and the need to hide behind obscurity. Here was a heady, shy 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of his life journey, trying to communicate to another 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of her life journey, a very simple message: The hope that in some way their journeys would be connected. The amazing, unexpected thing about this is that the hope came true, both in the more mundane, exterior sense of occasional visits and catchings up, but also in the more important sense of taking her along as part of my interior community. By the time I’d finished typing this poem into my computer, cleaning up the punctuation, adding annotations to blow away some of the cobwebs of obscurity, and cutting the bits that wandered or went on too long, I was impressed. In the later sections of this poem I finally managed to get outside of my self-preoccupation and to really focus on another person. In the years since, I’ve written dozens of poems for people I’ve cared about: parents, siblings, children, in-laws, friends, and colleagues. But as far as I can tell, that all started here.
Background: When I was in Toledo in early January, I went up to my study and found a couple of folders, one with letters from Margaret from 1967-1969, saved all these years, and the other of poems from the same time, including a couple held together with a rusty paper clip and a 4 X 6 index card (possibly left over from high school debate?) on which I’d written “early Margaret poems”. At first it felt a bit painful to read them: They seemed full of unnecessary obscurity, when what I really wanted to say was that I really respected her as a person.
But there they were, and I couldn’t not read them. What I can’t remember now is whether in fact I ever presented any of them to her. The references in the middle section of the main one (“The Turning”) make me think that I must have written this for her 17th birthday, not long after I got back from my family’s long trek to Alaska in the summer of 1967. In reading through it, I was struck by how parts of the poem seemed to prefigure things that happened later.
So a couple of weeks before she died I sent the poem to her in an email together with some of this explanatory material before and after. I knew that she didn’t have long to live, so it was my good-bye to her. Now that she is gone, it seems to apply to her present situation, on her journey from this life to whatever is next. No one knows what this is, but sometimes we get inklings. My mom has since had a vision of her in a white room filled with light, being healed and ministered to by those who came before her. That makes sense to me. However, my vision of her is a bit different: We know that she was excited about the prospect of discovering what was next for her. For me, it feels as though she has at last begun the voyage described in a poem I wrote for her in 1967. Looking at this poem from the other end of my life, in the wake of Margaret’s passing, I wonder what it will be like for me to take the same journey that she has now begun.
The title is a complicated and fairly obscure play on her name. Since this, I’ve a done lot with this kind of etymological-metaphoric approach over the years, in other poems but also in a series of articles I published. Much of the meaning of the poem eluded me at first, but as I went through I started adding a few annotations in brackets, and that helped.
Soft Flows the Stream, As Stars upon the Sea are Pearls
Soft flows the stream:
See the humble coracle,
[a small skin boat used by medieval Irish monks;
I suspect that this is supposed to represent Margaret]
Riding the waters in silence.
Leaving the flowery leas,
One cast eyes upon
The crystal crucifix
And you saw a single Pearl
Amid the last brilliant flashes
Of the setting sun’s
Last beam.
Came the insect
[I don’t know exactly why, but I think I’m referring to myself]
As the coracle reached the sea,
Scratching to be seen.
Brendan smiled,
[a reference to the famous sea-faring medieval Irish saint,
15 years before we looked at our new born first child
and realized that this was his name;
here I think he’s meant to symbolize the Spiritual generally:
God, Jesus, Buddha]
Transfiguring the insect:
A guilty cloud of smoke,
Expanding supernova cloud,
Took the disembodied journey.
A turn in the starsea path
Brought the dolphin
[I think this and the previous bit are talking
about reincarnation, which means that the dolphin
is also me, a much nicer image, I think…]
Beside her [the coracle’s] rounded bow.
The saint smiles
But she is free –
You are free, and
The dolphin desires
Only the Koinonia.
Seeing visions of islands
In the west;
[In Celtic mythology, the land of Faerie,
where we go when we die, is in the West; that is, Heaven]
Promises to find and keep
Where the sea is the table
For all such things;
[The image of the Communion Table
comes to me now as I read this]
Where grace is the way
To lead all things;
The dolphin will not
Force the course;
Two wakes meet
And mix between.
[Thirty-nine years later, in 2006,
I would use a similar image in the poem I wrote
for Brendan and Mayumi’s wedding.]
[I’ve skipped a dark and somewhat muddled part here; then we come to the middle section of the poem, which I apparently later pulled out as a separate poem, called:]
The Turning
Times change
Refining todays, melting
All the layered yesterdays.
[McArthur Park is melting in the rain, anyone?]
Smile upon the changes good
Mark well all changes evil…
Time and changes will not cease;
Perhaps, soon a bit more evil
Then more good.
But of time there is
No real knowing
Time is not the seeming
Nor we. The
Counting of years increases:
Years are so arbitrary
Yet their turning marks with
Symbolic pageantry
The growth, the changes within.
Within the changes:
Symbolic initiation
The turning of the stair…
O do not despair
The length of the journey:
The island you chose as destiny
Is fair but far;
Others may rest sooner
But the gain and glory
Will be yours.
[I’ve skipped a section here that seems to go on too long about storms and things, then we get to the last section:]
… Until the storm fades
To gentle breeze,
Soft stream from fragrant
Flowery leas borne on
The smell of salt,
And the humble coracle
Nears the island [of the Blessed]
So far to journey
So long from Eire [Ireland],
Genesis of journey,
And the memory
Of home sings of childhood
And hope,
While the tide comes in,
While time passes beyond years
Marked with circumstance,
To mean another branch has grown,
Another step is taken up the beach.
And the vision of dawn shimmers
Wherever your eyes gaze,
Shining prophecies of the promise
Into the sea,
And the blessings of an advocate
[1 John 2:1]
Emanate from the Cross
Of crystal and the Pearl:
Keeping company
With the coracle, with you,
With the Saint’s unseen presence,
With the dolphin:
Rippling stars upon the sea
Glitter to open eyes,
Pearls set upon the swirling sky
In the hours
Before Dawn.
-Robert KW Elliott, August 1967
Further reflections from 2011: As I worked my way back into this poem after all these years, it felt like a form of time travel, like Proust and the madeleine cookie in Remembrance of Times Past: The essential meanings and feelings of it came back to me, now reflected calmly and without the pain and the need to hide behind obscurity. Here was a heady, shy 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of his life journey, trying to communicate to another 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of her life journey, a very simple message: The hope that in some way their journeys would be connected. The amazing, unexpected thing about this is that the hope came true, both in the more mundane, exterior sense of occasional visits and catchings up, but also in the more important sense of taking her along as part of my interior community. By the time I’d finished typing this poem into my computer, cleaning up the punctuation, adding annotations to blow away some of the cobwebs of obscurity, and cutting the bits that wandered or went on too long, I was impressed. In the later sections of this poem I finally managed to get outside of my self-preoccupation and to really focus on another person. In the years since, I’ve written dozens of poems for people I’ve cared about: parents, siblings, children, in-laws, friends, and colleagues. But as far as I can tell, that all started here.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Stephen & Elliott (2011), “Developing the Adjudicated Case Study“
Entry for 3 March 2011:
Commentary on a Commentary: For the past several years Dan Fishman, editor of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, has been trying to get me to submit one of our HSCED studies to his online journal. For various reasons, we’ve been unable to accommodate him. However, last Fall he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to write a commentary on two adjudicated case study projects, one from Ron Miller and his team, and the other from Art Bohart and colleagues. I asked Susan Stephen, one of my PhD students to work with me on this, because she has a special interest in the topic and is doing her PhD research on the HSCED method.
When the package of 10 articles arrived at the end of this past December, however, we realized that we’d gotten a bit more than we’d bargained for. There was a lot of material get through! However, we dived into the papers and were able to work our way through them. In the process, Susan got considerably ahead of me and ended up writing the bulk of the paper, so I was very pleased for her to be first author. Actually, I thought she did a great job, although I was able to earn my keep by adding several sections and contributing bits here and there, especially on the history. In the process I think we produced a very useful paper discussing issues about the implementation of adjudicated case study methods that we hadn’t seen discussed before. This paper, along with the rest of this issue of PCSP, now becomes required reading for everyone involved in HSCED and other adjudicated case study methods, or even just contemplating using this method.
Abstract: In this commentary we discuss Miller’s Panel of Psychological Inquiry (PPI) and Bohart’s Research Jury method approaches to the development of the adjudicated case study method, as represented by the papers assembled for this issue of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy. In our view, the case studies presented here demonstrate the rapidly developing potential offered by this approach for psychotherapy research and reveal many parallels to recent research using the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design (HSCED) model. In our view, each of the three models has taken significant steps forward in adapting particular aspects of the legal process as viable psychotherapy research procedures. In this commentary we summarize the HSCED method, then take readers through the issues of the sources of the evidence used; ways in which that evidence is tested; claims, burden and standard of proof; and the handling of the adjudication process itself. We conclude with recommendations for further development of adjudicated case study methods.
Reference: Stephen, S., & Elliott, R. (2011). Developing the Adjudicated Case Study Method. Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, 7(1), 230-241. Available online at: http://pcsp.libraries.rutgers.edu.
Commentary on a Commentary: For the past several years Dan Fishman, editor of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, has been trying to get me to submit one of our HSCED studies to his online journal. For various reasons, we’ve been unable to accommodate him. However, last Fall he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to write a commentary on two adjudicated case study projects, one from Ron Miller and his team, and the other from Art Bohart and colleagues. I asked Susan Stephen, one of my PhD students to work with me on this, because she has a special interest in the topic and is doing her PhD research on the HSCED method.
When the package of 10 articles arrived at the end of this past December, however, we realized that we’d gotten a bit more than we’d bargained for. There was a lot of material get through! However, we dived into the papers and were able to work our way through them. In the process, Susan got considerably ahead of me and ended up writing the bulk of the paper, so I was very pleased for her to be first author. Actually, I thought she did a great job, although I was able to earn my keep by adding several sections and contributing bits here and there, especially on the history. In the process I think we produced a very useful paper discussing issues about the implementation of adjudicated case study methods that we hadn’t seen discussed before. This paper, along with the rest of this issue of PCSP, now becomes required reading for everyone involved in HSCED and other adjudicated case study methods, or even just contemplating using this method.
Abstract: In this commentary we discuss Miller’s Panel of Psychological Inquiry (PPI) and Bohart’s Research Jury method approaches to the development of the adjudicated case study method, as represented by the papers assembled for this issue of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy. In our view, the case studies presented here demonstrate the rapidly developing potential offered by this approach for psychotherapy research and reveal many parallels to recent research using the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design (HSCED) model. In our view, each of the three models has taken significant steps forward in adapting particular aspects of the legal process as viable psychotherapy research procedures. In this commentary we summarize the HSCED method, then take readers through the issues of the sources of the evidence used; ways in which that evidence is tested; claims, burden and standard of proof; and the handling of the adjudication process itself. We conclude with recommendations for further development of adjudicated case study methods.
Reference: Stephen, S., & Elliott, R. (2011). Developing the Adjudicated Case Study Method. Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, 7(1), 230-241. Available online at: http://pcsp.libraries.rutgers.edu.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Saturday adventure to the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh
Went to see amazing exhibit of photographs by early 20th century German photographer August Sander: People of the twentieth century: A cross section of people, Farmers and merchants, composers and bankers, Nazis and Jewish death camp prisoners, all portrayed with great compassion and without judgment, inhabiting their social roles, transcending time and place, reaching the level of human archetypes.
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibition/5:368/19935/
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibition/5:368/19935/
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Saturday 12 Feb 2011 along the River Kelvin
Running along the Kelvin River path on Saturday, thinking about Margaret's Memorial service that would happen in a few hours, I stopped at St. Gregory's Church and spent a few minutes praying at the shrine to the Virgin Mary in the car park at the back of the church: From a niche cut out of the rock face, she looks out toward the River Kelvin. I realized that she has been watching me every time I ran by here for the past 4 years.
A few minutes later, in another of the crazy contrasts that is such a part of our life here in Glasgow, as I ran up the path toward Half-penny Bridge, I came upon a gaggle of fisherman, fishing poles held high…. And a piper arrayed in kilt and all. I stopped to watch, and 30 seconds later, the piper began to play “Scotland the Brave”, the unofficial national anthem of Scotland. He processed over the bridge, followed by about 10 fishermen and various fellow onlookers. On the other side, he stopped, and the fisherman gathered by the rail, while two of them climbed over. A quaich and a bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey appeared. One of the men held the quaich, while the other poured the whiskey into it, then passed the bottle back over the rail where is was used to fill a lot of plastic cups. There was brief ceremony, to mark the opening of fishing season on the River Kelvin, “and may be it be a good a last year’s!”, followed by cheers and toasts and around.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Margaret Linstrom Weitzel, 1950 - 2011
Entry for 6 Feb 2011: (Posted to coincide with Margaret's Memorial Service in Reseda, California)
I first met Margaret in 1964 when she sat next to me in high school Latin 1 class. I was just back from a trip to Europe with my Grandmother, and was just starting to come out of my shell. I don’t remember how she did in the class, but it was a real struggle for me. We were both pretty shy at the time and only developed a friendship over time. I was just starting a spiritual journey that, over the next 8 years, would take me away from the Episcopalianism I’d been raised in, on a long, looping orbit through Quakerism, atheism, Buddhism, Christian Fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, and eventually back to the Episcopal Church. Margaret was an essential part of the journey for me, drawing me back when I was in danger of flying off into interstellar space, helping me ground myself in the Bible as I accompanied her and her family to the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Stockton (and later to one of the Baptist Churches in Lodi), where I was able to experience and to appreciate the importance of a deep grounding in a personal faith and the Bible.
Yesterday, on the 5th of February, 2011, Margaret died of cancer, aged 60. From my point of view, 60 is too young for her to die, but I don’t think it’s how Margaret saw it. Four months ago, as I was recovering from my surgery for prostate cancer, Margaret’s cancer was discovered, already at the metastatic stage. After Gail, her sister-in-law and a long-time friend (whom we’d just seen on her way through Glasgow on a North Atlantic cruise with Margaret's brother Hugh), emailed us in early October about Margaret’s cancer, I was in periodic contact with Margaret by email, as each of us followed our different cancer trajectories. We exchanged stories about our granddaughters and their metaphoric resonance with our situation, and wrote about how our illness was highlighting what was most important to us. I prayed for Margaret; she prayed for me. Through this time, she continued to inspire me, as she always has, with her spiritual, moral and personal witness, even as she grew too weak to respond to me herself and had to have her husband Rich write for her.
This morning, before church, I woke to find Gail’s email saying that Margaret had died. We’d been expecting this, but it was still a shock, as if some part of me had died also. All day I’ve carried this sense of mourning with me.
I heard her voice in today’s lessons: Isaiah 58: 1 -9 and 2 Corinthians 2: 1 - 12. I remembered how she read and quoted the Bible from memory, the excitement and energy and joy in her voice. And I realized that ever since then, whenever I had to get up in church to read a lesson, it was Margaret’s voice speaking through me, echoing the ecstatic cry of the creatures in Revelation, untangling Paul’s sometimes twisted syntax to pull out the meaning.
I remembered also how she “found me” in the Letter to the Hebrews, as, like Jesus, a priest not of the Levites (the Jewish priestly tribe) but “of the order of Melchizedek”, a perfect metaphor that found a place for and validated my restless searching that sometimes seemed to place me outside conventional spirituality.
But most of all, I remembered Margaret’s absolute faith in God, so solid compared to my doubts and waverings. Once, late in high school or more likely early in our university years during a holiday, someone led us through a guided meditation. Margaret visualized herself as a speck of dust, almost insubstantial. “How awful!”, the rest of us said. “No,” Margaret said, “I don’t need to be any more than that, because God is there: He is more real and more solid than I am, and He is all I need. He is the only thing I am sure of, that I know with certainty.” I have never forgotten this vision of hers, and of her ability to be absolutely certain of God. It is this certainty that God was holding her through the cancer that I have carried with me these past months, imagining her surrounded by God’s Light and Love.
After the service I went up to St Anne’s Chapel and put up a prayer request for Margaret; then I went to the back of the Nave and lit a candle for her. It was only then that a huge wave of sadness hit me, and I went and sat down and cried for a few minutes. As I cried, a bit of her certainty suddenly came over me, saying, “Margaret is OK,” and I felt something ease in my body. I said to myself, “It is the rest of us who are hurting. But really, the truth is, she is in all of us still, and she’s not going away.”
I have more to say about Margaret and may do so at another time, but this is enough for now, to mark her passing: For most of my life, even without her knowing it, she has been a personal saint for me, on my sometimes wandering or wavering spiritual journey. I am now experiencing her absence in my outer life, but the deeper truth is that she is still very much part of my inner landscape, and will be for the rest of my life and even, I hope, following her example, in how I approach my own death.
9-12 Feb 2011: Afterword: The Missing Story of the Mother Cat:
Apparently what I wrote above was not enough, because a couple of days later, and after I had sent along the Remembrance piece above to Rich, Hugh and Gail, I had an extremely vivid and complex sequence of dreams. I may share these dreams at a later time, but on reflection it became clear to me that the dreams were telling me that I had left outa very important and timely story of what I wrote above:
When I was about 19, I was home one summer, driving down a country road south of Lodi, when I came around a curve too fast to avoid running over a mother cat leading her kittens across the road. I hesitated, tempted to simply drive on, but then stopped my car and went back to house in front of which I had run over the mother cat. Getting out of my car, I went up to the woman in the front yard and told her I was very sorry but I had just over her mother cat. Now I don’t remember anything else, but later that day or perhaps the next day, I told Margaret about this incident. Pleased with myself for having had the courage to stop, and trying to reassure myself, I said, “But it’s OK because I told the woman who owned the cat.” Margaret paused and said something, calmly and with great conviction, that I have never forgotten: “No, it’s not OK; the mother cat is still dead.” In that moment I felt confronted by my own naïve, moral carelessness. The lesson for me was that although I didn’t intend to harm the mother cat or her owner or her kittens, and although I did take responsibility for my actions, several someones were still damaged by what I had done and it was very important not to lose sight of that.
It’s clear to me now that I previously put off telling this story because it was too emotionally resonant with Margaret’s death. My sense of her deep moral integrity is such that I can only imagine that she would apply the same principle to her own situation even now, in death. But I want to say this to her now: "Although your death causes me pain and leaves me feeling very sad, it is a pain and a sadness that I gladly bear, because it marks how important you have been and will continue to be to me. The sadness I feel at your passing tells me not to pull away but instead to connect with those I love and who love me."
I first met Margaret in 1964 when she sat next to me in high school Latin 1 class. I was just back from a trip to Europe with my Grandmother, and was just starting to come out of my shell. I don’t remember how she did in the class, but it was a real struggle for me. We were both pretty shy at the time and only developed a friendship over time. I was just starting a spiritual journey that, over the next 8 years, would take me away from the Episcopalianism I’d been raised in, on a long, looping orbit through Quakerism, atheism, Buddhism, Christian Fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, and eventually back to the Episcopal Church. Margaret was an essential part of the journey for me, drawing me back when I was in danger of flying off into interstellar space, helping me ground myself in the Bible as I accompanied her and her family to the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Stockton (and later to one of the Baptist Churches in Lodi), where I was able to experience and to appreciate the importance of a deep grounding in a personal faith and the Bible.
Yesterday, on the 5th of February, 2011, Margaret died of cancer, aged 60. From my point of view, 60 is too young for her to die, but I don’t think it’s how Margaret saw it. Four months ago, as I was recovering from my surgery for prostate cancer, Margaret’s cancer was discovered, already at the metastatic stage. After Gail, her sister-in-law and a long-time friend (whom we’d just seen on her way through Glasgow on a North Atlantic cruise with Margaret's brother Hugh), emailed us in early October about Margaret’s cancer, I was in periodic contact with Margaret by email, as each of us followed our different cancer trajectories. We exchanged stories about our granddaughters and their metaphoric resonance with our situation, and wrote about how our illness was highlighting what was most important to us. I prayed for Margaret; she prayed for me. Through this time, she continued to inspire me, as she always has, with her spiritual, moral and personal witness, even as she grew too weak to respond to me herself and had to have her husband Rich write for her.
This morning, before church, I woke to find Gail’s email saying that Margaret had died. We’d been expecting this, but it was still a shock, as if some part of me had died also. All day I’ve carried this sense of mourning with me.
I heard her voice in today’s lessons: Isaiah 58: 1 -9 and 2 Corinthians 2: 1 - 12. I remembered how she read and quoted the Bible from memory, the excitement and energy and joy in her voice. And I realized that ever since then, whenever I had to get up in church to read a lesson, it was Margaret’s voice speaking through me, echoing the ecstatic cry of the creatures in Revelation, untangling Paul’s sometimes twisted syntax to pull out the meaning.
I remembered also how she “found me” in the Letter to the Hebrews, as, like Jesus, a priest not of the Levites (the Jewish priestly tribe) but “of the order of Melchizedek”, a perfect metaphor that found a place for and validated my restless searching that sometimes seemed to place me outside conventional spirituality.
But most of all, I remembered Margaret’s absolute faith in God, so solid compared to my doubts and waverings. Once, late in high school or more likely early in our university years during a holiday, someone led us through a guided meditation. Margaret visualized herself as a speck of dust, almost insubstantial. “How awful!”, the rest of us said. “No,” Margaret said, “I don’t need to be any more than that, because God is there: He is more real and more solid than I am, and He is all I need. He is the only thing I am sure of, that I know with certainty.” I have never forgotten this vision of hers, and of her ability to be absolutely certain of God. It is this certainty that God was holding her through the cancer that I have carried with me these past months, imagining her surrounded by God’s Light and Love.
After the service I went up to St Anne’s Chapel and put up a prayer request for Margaret; then I went to the back of the Nave and lit a candle for her. It was only then that a huge wave of sadness hit me, and I went and sat down and cried for a few minutes. As I cried, a bit of her certainty suddenly came over me, saying, “Margaret is OK,” and I felt something ease in my body. I said to myself, “It is the rest of us who are hurting. But really, the truth is, she is in all of us still, and she’s not going away.”
I have more to say about Margaret and may do so at another time, but this is enough for now, to mark her passing: For most of my life, even without her knowing it, she has been a personal saint for me, on my sometimes wandering or wavering spiritual journey. I am now experiencing her absence in my outer life, but the deeper truth is that she is still very much part of my inner landscape, and will be for the rest of my life and even, I hope, following her example, in how I approach my own death.
9-12 Feb 2011: Afterword: The Missing Story of the Mother Cat:
Apparently what I wrote above was not enough, because a couple of days later, and after I had sent along the Remembrance piece above to Rich, Hugh and Gail, I had an extremely vivid and complex sequence of dreams. I may share these dreams at a later time, but on reflection it became clear to me that the dreams were telling me that I had left outa very important and timely story of what I wrote above:
When I was about 19, I was home one summer, driving down a country road south of Lodi, when I came around a curve too fast to avoid running over a mother cat leading her kittens across the road. I hesitated, tempted to simply drive on, but then stopped my car and went back to house in front of which I had run over the mother cat. Getting out of my car, I went up to the woman in the front yard and told her I was very sorry but I had just over her mother cat. Now I don’t remember anything else, but later that day or perhaps the next day, I told Margaret about this incident. Pleased with myself for having had the courage to stop, and trying to reassure myself, I said, “But it’s OK because I told the woman who owned the cat.” Margaret paused and said something, calmly and with great conviction, that I have never forgotten: “No, it’s not OK; the mother cat is still dead.” In that moment I felt confronted by my own naïve, moral carelessness. The lesson for me was that although I didn’t intend to harm the mother cat or her owner or her kittens, and although I did take responsibility for my actions, several someones were still damaged by what I had done and it was very important not to lose sight of that.
It’s clear to me now that I previously put off telling this story because it was too emotionally resonant with Margaret’s death. My sense of her deep moral integrity is such that I can only imagine that she would apply the same principle to her own situation even now, in death. But I want to say this to her now: "Although your death causes me pain and leaves me feeling very sad, it is a pain and a sadness that I gladly bear, because it marks how important you have been and will continue to be to me. The sadness I feel at your passing tells me not to pull away but instead to connect with those I love and who love me."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)