The Very Rev. David Giuliano

... continued from Moderator's Blog: Through the Valley of Shadows

Notes from the Valley 11: Good News, August 18, 2007

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Matthew 4.23

Little children toss and turn counting “how many sleeps” until some anticipated event. In jail, inmates toss and turn counting “how many get-ups” until their release. I'm counting sleeps and get-ups—five and four, respectively—until these radiation treatments end on Wednesday. Thursday—sweet day to even speak—I will fly away home to Marathon.

Medically speaking, I should feel at my worst. My body is reaching its maximum radiation saturation. My tongue is sandpaper and all food taste like wood. My left ear feels like beef jerky—I imagine dogs in the park slathering with Pavlovian longing when I pass by. The eye next to the ear is pink, swollen, and its vision fuzzy. My hair is a fond and wispy memory. And I'm beginning to feel great—not just emotionally but even physically.

What has changed since last week or the week before is that hope is near. The vision of what lies ahead is transforming the present. I am experiencing the “already and not yet” nature of the gospel promise at a whole new level. What we hope for, dream of, anticipate transforms the now in very real ways.

Relative to the great sufferings and hopes of this world, this present journey of mine pales by comparison. But through it God is helping me to better understand how desperately critical hope is. It radically changes not only the future but the present.

We in the church say that we have been entrusted with the Good News of Jesus. Today it seems to me that there could be no more profoundly important work than sharing that news. Offering hope to people starving for love, to a world aching for a new way, feels urgent. The news that a person is the Beloved of the Creator can change his or her life—now. To proclaim that there is an alternative way of peace and justice possible on earth transforms the world—now.

Good news heals all manner of illness and sickness among the people. It is a breathtaking responsibility and honour to offer that promise to our neighbours and friends. It begins with taking that Good News into our own souls and beginning to live the hope it stirs in us. It changes nothing and yet it changes everything.

Notes from the Valley 12: Restored by Grace, August 20, 2007

“Rick” wasn't at his usual spot with his hat on the sidewalk by the Queen's Park subway this morning. Those of you who have been following my “Notes from the Valley” have already heard about Rick. He sleeps at a downtown shelter at night and panhandles on the street during the day. Over the summer and my daily visits to Princess Margaret Hospital , Rick and I have come to know each other a little. He's a generous, kind-hearted guy. Last week, seeing that all my hair had fallen out, Rick offered me an electric razor he had found. Each morning we share some loose change and conversation.

Last Friday when I said, I'll see you on Monday he was noncommittal. “Ya, maybe, but I might not be…you know.” I didn't know. I didn't ask. Now I am trying to remember if it was this time last month when he got his cheque and disappeared for a few days. I don't know what his “cheque” is—welfare? Ontario Disabilities Pension?

That time he told me, when I next saw him, “My cheque came in and then I've got to do something. I don't even want to do it, I hate it, but I can't help myself.” I assumed he meant that when his cheque came he went on a bender. He feels both ashamed of and helpless over the power of alcohol in his life. It was as though he both looked forward to and dreaded his monthly cheque. Paul confessed to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7.15). I think Rick knows what Paul meant.

If we're honest, don't we all? It would easy for me to smugly conclude that Rick needed to have some will power, some backbone and just quit drinking. It would be easy but I am too conscious of my own weakness, too aware of the demons that want to oppress my freedom in Christ. I'm too aware of the times when I fail to be true to the person I'm called to be to feel very judgmental of Rick.

In the modern world we call it compulsion or addiction—food, drugs, shopping, booze, work, sex, fear, lies, greed, violence. Name your poison, the list goes on. In the “old days” they called it possession. There are spiritual forces, powers and principalities bearing down on us, seducing us all from The Way. Sometimes they overpower us. Only by grace are we restored to our place in the world.

One Sunday morning in Marathon I was feeling pretty lousy about my self. I had been ill-tempered and impatient the previous week. I had faked concern with hurting people. When it came time in worship to exchange the peace I wandered through the congregation shaking hands. Then “Paul”, a great bear of a man, locked his arms around me and squeezed the breath out of my lungs. He said with laughter in his voice, “You are forgiven.” And I knew I was.

How do people without a community of reconciliation survive? For me, it is only by the forgiveness of grace experienced in community that I can fall and stand again. During most weeks we do things we don't want to do and fail to do things we wish we had done. On Sunday morning when we pass the peace, we are saying “You are forgiven.” We begin again.

I'm hoping to see Rick tomorrow or the next day. I am praying that something in our conversation can in some small way restore him to himself, to his rightful place as one of the beloved of God.

Notes from the Valley 13: Healing and Transformation, August 31, 2007

It has been a frustrating week at home. Oh, there have been wonderful things about it. Sleeping in my own bed beside my beloved. On Sunday we hosted a community feast to celebrate all the young people heading off on new adventures this week. I got to watch Jeremiah, our 20-year-old son, play two songs and place third at the “Pic River First Nation Idol” contest. Naomi, who is 17, and I drove over to Schrieber where she passed her “G2” driver's licence. I've managed a couple of short walks.

The frustrating part is that I still feel tired and weak a lot of the time. My taste buds have not re-sprouted themselves. My jaw is still stiff. My eye is infected. My hair isn't even thinking about coming back. I know. I know. They told me it would take some time after the radiation ended to feel better. I just hoped that it wouldn't!

I want to be healed, instantly, like the lepers, the blind, the lame in the stories of Jesus. I want to be transformed in an instant like Paul on the Road to Damascus . In my experience, the Damascus road is a long one. Healing and transformation takes time.

There were days in this valley carved by cancer when I thought, “This changes everything. I'll never be the same.” A brush with mortality, the encounter of limitation, having to trust in God in the midst of uncertainty. How could I ever be the same? I am discovering this week that I have been changed by this journey in the valley. And I am still the same imperfect person I've always been.

I see colours more intensely, appreciate stillness more fully, and savour touch in a new way. My love for and pleasure in family and friends is more profound than ever. Scarred, disfigured, and bald, I see my self more truly than ever. On the other hand, I can still be impatient, critical, irritated and distracted by the small details of daily living. I've been healed and not healed, changed and not changed by this time in the valley.

As you know I've been wondering about the ways my body might be telling the story of the healing and transformation our faith community is undergoing. Are we imagining that there might be a single dramatic, once and for all kind of change? It seems that we need to trust God, knowing that healing takes time, that transformation is an ongoing thing. Like a journey, we arrive in new places but we arrive as ourselves not as someone else, some transformed organism—though it may feel that way at times. Let's continue the journey in faith, trusting that we are being healed, gradually growing in Jesus' love.

Notes from the Valley 14: Unrecognizable, September 12, 2007

Yesterday I dropped in to see our friend Kim at her “Styles” salon. I stepped in out of the rain and there was no hint of recognition on her face. She smiled curiously from behind the desk, the way you smile to strangers here. Not until I doffed my ball cap from my bald head and demanded a trim, did she realize it was me.

I’ve changed. My hair is gone. My left eye is a bit wonky and there is a pound of my back grafted to my face. There are ways I’ve changed within, too. Those are more difficult to see. Sometimes though I think I feel them, in my posture, in my stride. People around here don’t always recognize me, right away. At least not until they hear my voice—inflicted on them for 20 years at worship, funerals, weddings, community meetings, and in coffee shops.

Changes have made me, at least for moment, unrecognizable. To be unrecognizable, even for an instant, here in Marathon, where I’ve been for years, is a bit disconcerting. The moment passes quickly. Who can blame them, I’ve changed. To tell the truth, I hardly recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I was kind of used to looking the way I looked.

There are things that can be done to make me look more like the old me. My favourite: The plastic surgeon tells me that the big thing now is implanting powerful magnets under the scalp to tether one’s toupee. I think he’s pulling my leg. Besides, I go through a lot of airport metal detectors.

Jeremiah, our 20-year-old, says that a little graft reduction might be a good idea. “You have to talk in public a lot. You don’t want to be talking and all people hear is ‘blah, blah, blah’ because they’re thinking, ‘What’s that thing on his head?’”

I’m not getting magnets in my scalp. Not sure about the graft reduction. Part of me feels it would be wrong to make this journey through the valley and come out looking the same. I am different, and I am the same. It is unfamiliar and some days I don’t recognize myself. But that’s the way it is.

I wonder if it will be like that for us as a church. I wonder if that is part of this struggle to respond to God’s call to The United Church of Canada now. We’re having a hard time accepting that we will be changed. Will we be unrecognizable, not only to strangers but to those who’ve always lived nearby? I wonder if we will recognize ourselves. What if worship doesn’t always happen on Sunday morning, choir on Thursday night, and coffee-time is no longer our third sacrament? What if getting ourselves out of church into the world trumps getting people into church as our priority? What would we look like if we were truly healed of our religious and cultural superiority complex and all the ways that shape the way we look? What if we truly imagined a community, not a building, when we said the word church? What if we took Jesus at his word that giving up our lives is the only way to live instead of anxiously trying to survive? Would we be unrecognizable? Will we be different and the same?

Notes from the Valley 15: I Want to Remember, September 28, 2007

I had hoped, when elected Moderator, to use my strengths, my wisdom, my gifts to serve God through our church. I even fantasized that I might receive a special measure of charisms for this high calling: perhaps a transforming vision, or theological brilliance, or profound spiritual depth, or rousing oratory. Maybe I would speak in tongues, faith heal, learn to sing on key!

Instead I got cancer. Instead God has been using not my strength but my weakness, not my power but my powerlessness. What has stirred my heart and imagination, and that of our community it seems, has been not my vitality and excellence but my brokenness. This is no false humility on my part. Truthfully, I am not given easily to humility of any kind. But it seems that the best I have offered so far, what has most served our common body, has been my weakness and imperfection.

We bring both to the body. Our strengths, skills, and gifts, and our brokenness, limitation, and heartache.

It has been profoundly important to me over the past five months that the resurrected body of Christ is a wounded Christ. To erase any doubt about the scandal of a risen and wounded Lord, Jesus says to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe" (John 20:27). The wounds are part of the Body of Christ. I want to remember that, to continue to know it the way I know it right now.

I am gradually feeling stronger. I am gradually emerging from the valley of shadows into which cancer carried me against my will. There are things, though, I want to bring with me from the valley. They feel like precious gifts I have been given to carry and to share. I know that they are for me and wonder if they are for us together too. How might we look, for example, if we moved as a church built on a legacy of religious and cultural superiority, on power and privilege, to one that welcomed our brokenness and limitation? What would it be like if we truly took up the cross?

I want to remember that God tabernacles in weakness, that, as Leonard Cohen put it, everything has a crack in it that lets the light in.

I want to remember other things too. Things like the importance of paring down and slowing down when we are in the midst of suffering, how when we are healing we cannot afford to waste energy on things that are not giving life.

I want to remember that healing is sometimes a lifelong journey. I want to remember that we are never completely “healed,” at least not in the way the word is used in our culture of judgment, competition, and “self-help.” I am, now, in some ways freer, more gentle, more easily moved by kindness and beauty. I am also still “stiff necked,” insecure, and impatient at times.

I want to remember that I am capable of trusting and loving God even when I am unable to "feel" God’s presence. That God’s love does not rely on my capacity to receive and take that love in. I want to remember that “battle” and “fight” are not the path to peace or healing. I want to continue to practise a spirit of welcome and loving curiosity toward myself and others. Even those parts of my self, and of others, that are difficult or unlovely.

I want to remember what Jesus told his disciples when they asked, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

He said, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him” (John 9.2-3).

Our weakness, our brokenness—individually or as a community—is not punishment, or a lesson, or a test from God. It is a place where the God of our little Christ, our crucified Christ, our risen and wounded Christ, can be glorified.

Notes from the Valley 16: Field Notes on Fear, November 3, 2007

Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher.

Isaiah 30:20

A quick health update: I’ve spent much of the past four weeks in the grips of a heavyweight virus that put the boots to my immune system already compromised by surgeries and radiation treatments.

My body went for a walk but my mind was like a crazed squirrel jumping from branch to branch of worries and fears. My body ambled along the glorious shores of Lake Superior. My mind, though, tripped over the jagged rocks of this illness and whether I can possibly be strong enough for this work that has chosen me. If my brain had hands, it would have been wringing them over what God wants of my weakness. This hurricane of medical worries, notes for upcoming sermons, dates, Bible passages, ideas for this blog, and confusion touched down like three pounds of wet clay in my belly. It’s hard to get clear when you are afraid.

People sometimes comment on how “courageous” I’ve been over the past 10 months of surgeries, radiation treatments, and this recent set-back. That cracks me up. I have pretty much been experimenting full-time with fear (against my will I might add). I’m trying to attend to “the Teacher” on our behalf. Here are some recent findings.

Tell the truth about fear. Talk about it with people who can listen. The other day, Eli, my doctor and friend, called to see how I was doing. I said I was feeling quite tired and still had an uneasy lump in my stomach. He said, “That lump makes me wonder if you are feeling anxious.” I said, “Yes I am, I’ve been worrying about things.” We talked a little about those worries. The feeling in my stomach lifted almost instantly. Maybe if we talked more honestly about our fears they would have less power among us.

Be in the moment as much as you can. Fears are always about what lies ahead. My walking mantra is, “Be still and know that I am God.” It helps to settle my anxious heart and lets me savour a little of the beauty of the present. How much love and money are not risked, how many dreams and visions are stifled because we are paralyzed by fears about what might lay ahead?

Stay connected—with God, community, and self. Here are some things that have been healing and en-couraging for me over the past weeks. Pet your dog if you’ve got one. Go to church, stay for the potluck if they've got one. Let people bring you Jell-O and custard and soup. Pray. Visit with your neighbours. Ask them how their life is going and listen. Call the church and tell them you need a pastoral visit. Go for walks with friends. Nap if you’re tired. Read the Bible. In the evening sit on opposite ends of the couch with your beloved so that you can hold each other’s feet while you talk. At the table, hold hands and read a prayer from “A Grateful Heart” or another prayer book. Phone people who make you laugh or cry.

Finally, remember that you are not your fear. Fear is part of me. It is an emotion I have but it does not have to have me. I am more than my fears. So much more. I am beloved. I can be faithful and afraid at the same time but have to choose—sometimes from moment to moment—between those incompatible masters and allow faith to shape me. I am choosing to be faithful—to trust the promises of scripture, the gospel of Jesus crucified and risen, the fidelity of the One Love, and the mystery that continues to pursue us all.

Those are the latest field notes from the Valley of Shadows in the ongoing experiments with fear. What discoveries have you made?

Notes from the Valley 17: Suffering the Cure, November 13, 2007

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’

Luke 21:5-6

It occurred to me today that I am, and have been, suffering not cancer but the cure. Other than recurring hardwood knots on my forehead, cancer has never really caused me much physical discomfort. The spiritual and emotional discomfort is another story.

On the other hand, the cure has involved six or seven surgeries—I’ve lost count. The cure has caused nausea, the permanent loss of the hair on one side of my head and an eyebrow, a 15-inch purple scar on my back and a welt of flesh on my face, burns and generally feeling horse-kicked for the past four or five months. The vision in my left eye is blurry, my sinuses can puff up behind that eye like a marshmallow full of needles, and the teeth on the radiation side of my jaw are still loose and screech when exposed to cold liquids. I am weak and tire easily.

I’m not suggesting that I should have left well enough alone. Cancer, untreated, rarely takes care of itself. One ignores it at one’s peril. If not a sentence of certain death, it drastically raises the odds that even more painful and debilitating treatments lie ahead. So the suffering caused by the cure is a down payment on my future health.

Here is Jesus, telling his disciples that the temple—the sign of God’s permanence and special love for Israel—would be reduced to rubble in the days to come (and by the time Luke is being written, it has indeed been destroyed). The disciples must have been slack-jawed with disbelief to hear Jesus even say such a thing, let alone imagine it actually happening!

Jesus, I don’t think was talking about stones and mortar, and I’m not saying that we should bulldoze our buildings. Not only would my life be at risk, I don’t think buildings are the point. There are other kinds of "beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God."

I am wondering what “temples” I have built, fortified, and revered that are now collapsing within me. What are the "beautiful stones" by which I am beguiled? What attitudes and ways of being in the world, what illusions about who I am, is this difficult cure clearing away? What new world will I encounter when I am able to see beyond the grief and loss of what once was?

Perhaps we can ask the same questions of the “temples” we hold in common. Are the stones of cultural and religious superiority, of power and position, of wealth, numbers, and strength toppling? Is God clearing the way for a less certain, more humble way that welcomes weakness, vulnerability, and woundedness as sources of grace and beauty in The Body? Are we prepared to suffer the cure?

... continued at Moderator's Blog: Through the Valley of Shadows (continued)