Moderator's Blog: Through the Valley of Shadows

Photo: The Rev. David Giuliano, 39th Moderator (2006-2009)

In early May 2007, Moderator David Giuliano informed the church that he was facing surgery to remove a tumour from the temple of his forehead. Since then, he has been writing about the experience by posting entries to his regular blog on the WonderCafe website (www.wondercafe.ca*). Further entries on this topic will be added as they become available.

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Notes from the Valley 20: “All Better,” February 6, 2008

I am healing like a little boy who wants to grow taller. It seems as though I will never grow, but if I mark my height with a pencil on the kitchen door frame, in a month or two I can see that I really am recovering. I’ve done some skiing, gone for a run. If I miss my nap one day, I don’t feel sick the next. If I stop to measure I can see that am getting “taller.”

Our journey with the Spirit is a bit like that. We wonder, with Van Morrison, when we will ever learn to live in God? But if we look back over our lives we may discover that we are indeed learning to live in God.

At the same time, sometimes in the same instance, I realize that there is also still an impatient little boy, within. We want to be “all grown up” in God. We want what hurts to be “all better.”

Lately, I’ve been having some conversations that go like this…

Someone asks me, “So you’re feeling better, now?”

“Yes, I’m coming along,” I respond. “It’s a bit slower than I would like, but coming.”

“But you’re better, right.” Now more statement than question.

“I’m sure getting there.”

Increasingly insistent: “Everything is fine then, now I mean. You look great!”

“Thanks and I am feeling better, not everything is—”

“But overall,” I detect a note of pleading, “you’re back to work, all better, feeling good.”

“Overall. Mostly, my energy levels are not quite—”

“But you’re fine now.”

“Sure.”

“That’s great to hear.”

I don’t know what drives it. Hoping the best for me? Discomfort with fragility and brokenness—especially in a leader? A desperate request for evidence that the thousands of prayers flags fluttered on my behalf “worked”? Maybe it speaks of our difficulty, as a church in acknowledging “the brokenness, pain, and fear we carry” as our “A Call to Purpose” put it. Somewhere in the exchange is a notion that there is a destination of “all better” and we are impatient to arrive there.

I wonder if there really is an “all better.” I accept “not-all-better-ness” has a place in my own and our communal wholeness. Superficially, my body will never be the same—scars will remain, hair will not return, and my vision seems to be permanently compromised. The sort of stuff we all deal with sooner or later.

I am indeed healing. Part of that healing is to hold in gentle love the imperfections and woundedness that persist. These are often the pathways God follows into our heart. When we are as empty as a Tibetan beggar’s bowl, God’s Spirit enters, fills us.

The Christ longs for union with us. Our ideas about “all-better-ness” get in the way. Through my own small experience of illness I am learning to truly love and welcome the, at times unlovely, Christ. This Christ is not the Uberman of triumph and victory but the one who shares the cosmic cross for the world.

During Lent we turn our hearts toward those places that are not “all better” in our lives, not “all better” in our families, not “all better” in our world. Perhaps it will help to see them as places where we might learn more fully to live in God.

The Very Rev. David Giuliano