Strong Enough To Confess Weakness

Dear Faltering Friends:

 Care is what we do when we’re waiting for a cure. It’s transient, it’s temporary, which is why we are really bad at caring for people who cannot be cured.

Over the past two decades the hospice movement has addressed some of this dissonance. For the terminally ill, after the medical industrial complex has given up on checking the win column for your condition, they will transition your treatment to a group of extremely compassionate professionals who do not consider mortality to be failure. Comfort, dignity, respect and connection replace tests and treatments, and the patient is afforded the luxury of choices previously forbidden in the name of recovery. The context for end-of-life care is home, or a place that at least feels like home. What’s a bowl or two of ice cream or a snort of scotch when time is short? Better to enjoy one’s days than prolong them.

To those with non-lethal but lingering conditions, however, we deny the indulgences afforded the dying. As a society we’re uncomfortable with any diagnosis that includes the words degenerative or permanent, even squeamish around long-term or indeterminate. Because we are fixated on cure, or at least adaptation that makes one appear cured, we feel awkward around cognitive dementia, paralysis, impaired sensory or motor coordination, non-conforming psychological or neurological impairment, symptoms we could endure to witness if things got better; but when another’s condition doesn’t cure in response to our care, we fall into care-fatigue and weary of their seemingly ungrateful non-compliance.

Because our categories are binary—sick or well, wounded or healed—our treatments are equally binary. Those who have enduring conditions are stuck with facilities designed for transient care. We euphemistically call them “nursing” or “rehabilitation” homes, or centers, or courts, or even communities, when the reality is they will neither be nursed back to health nor restored to habilitation. The lighting is institutional; the wardrobes are clinical. Dinner at five, nightclothes donned at six, entertainment is television and visitors sent home at eight; don’t even ask about meal choices, or field trips, or listening to your own music, or having space for too many family pictures, or picking your own brand of snacks or the freedom to eat them when you choose. Institutions are designed for economies of scale, not the accommodation of whims. It’s tolerable if you’re getting better and going home, frightfully tragic if you’re only passing time until hospice.

Of course, things are marginally better for those who have stashed away some wealth on the road to infirmity, but one of the great ironies of privatized healthcare is how quickly it consumes every drop of equity. That nest egg carefully hatched over a lifetime is quickly scrambled in the institutional omelet of physical decline. As a chaplain and now a pastor, I’ve had more than one conversation with someone who lamented they did not die sooner of a quick heart attack or massive stroke. At least there would have been something left for the grandchildren. We’ve got to do better.

I write this because I think the Christian faith community is uniquely qualified to do better. In hindsight the building committee six decades ago should not have suggested a building with ten levels, twelve if you count the Chancel and the Fellowship Hall stage. But the category is significantly beyond architecture and habitable visit-ability. We are a people who weekly repeat a confession of our perpetual inadequacy, sometimes in a unison prayer, often in the words of the worship assistant who provides personal witness to their persistent disabilities. This confession is not rewarded with a grand moment of healing; it’s answered by an assurance of pardon. It is not fixed; it’s forgiven. All of us are weak, all of us are frail, all of us fall short. Yet, as the weekly assurance proclaims, we are still welcome, included, cared for and cared about. We are still community; we are all still loved.

When that’s the weekly word to a congregation, how much easier should that same people find it gracefully simple to touch the pale and the frail, to find the forgotten and forgetting, to befriend the incompetent, the incoherent, the incontinent. We may no longer see them as strange or be impatient with their persistent limitations. Not because we are strong and they are weak, but because we too are incurably dependent upon grace, and together, we are kin.

Hoping to fade the line between abled and disabled, I remain,

 With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor