What the Dying Keep Saying

My new friend Kerry Egan spends her days with dying people, listening and talking.

Those conversations come with her job as a hospice chaplain, but the way her eyes come alive when she talks about what she has learned shows that it’s also a calling. The other day she and I talked about the poignancy of those hours spent with the terminally ill. She captured the stories in her book, On Living, and in radio and TV interviews since the book’s release.

In one of the interviews she was asked about what dying people want to talk about: “Mostly,” she said, “they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave.”

This is no mere sentimental reminiscing. “Often they talk about love they did not receive,” she said. And “sometimes,” when the failing patients “are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother.”

Kerry is also a chaplain, so talk about God figures in, too, but not in the way you might automatically think. And here is where I find her work especially interesting. For, she writes, “people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence.”

That is how we talk about God.

When I think about my own writing about spiritual things, I’m struck by the thought that how we experience our families also has much to do with how we relate to God. Exploring what it means to live amid our families can also help us talk more vividly, more concretely about God—the joys and sense of presence, and the sorrows and absence. A life-giving--or a destructive--family relationship can color everything.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve long thought that the Trinity, the traditional Christian view of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, can be more than a hopelessly abstract belief. It’s a portrait of how relationship resides at the foundation of all things, how intimacy inhabits God’s very nature.

And if we, God’s creatures, are made to relate, wired to connect, if we orient ourselves to truth or reality or disappointment or hope through closeness to others, then relationships provide a key way to understand also how we can pray. Some of God’s titles in Scripture, as Janet Martin Soskice notes, are powerful but impersonal: Rock, Fortress, Door. But then there are the intimate titles, also applied readily, exuberantly to God: “Father, Brother, Son, Spouse, Lover.”

Sometimes we don’t associate God with the aspects of human life that seem most poignant and vividly personal. Based on some vague spiritualities, we are to settle only for ethereal mistiness. I’m supposed to be moved by the turning of beautiful but impersonal seasons, expansive but inanimate sunrises. But it is in relationship that we know something or someone best.

I see in my experience with relationships angles that help me with my life’s harsher realities, with growing in faith in Christ. I’ve grown more interested lately in exploring the most daily and most arresting aspects of human experience: what happens between a parent and child, say, or the intimacy and brokenness lived out between spouses, even a return into the bosom of family after forsakenness. Such memories--some warming, some bruising--shape my life work of loving God. I intend to keep paying attention to them—to keep remembering and talking about them.