It’s All Saints Day today and I just read a message on Caring Bridge from my former clergy colleague in NY, Rev. Karen Eiler. Karen was the first pastor I met when I started my ministry in White Plains. A gifted preacher, singer, and master of the liturgical arts, she is a dynamic and creative spirit who radiates kindness and embodies the spirit of Aloha.
Karen is battling cancer. She is kept alive by chemo and prayer, and the fierce prayers of her friends who want her to stay just a while longer. Her posts on Caring Bridge are a mix of jokes, medical updates, stories, and pictures.
I’d like you all to meet my friend, Karen. Today she posted a riff on that old expression, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Except for Karen, weakened to easy exhaustion by cancer in her bones, everything looks like a bed. Including this “incomplete list” she posted:
- The two stone steps of my front porch before I need to climb them
- Every chair and couch and low table in my house
- The rugs too, though I recently learned that getting up from the floor is a very big problem, which rules them out as nap spots
- The driver’s seat of my car as I cross yet another big parking lot that doesn’t have enough handicapped parking spots
- Toilets, especially ones with walls nearby or fold-down railings. Which mine now has, thanks to the Spirit Builders! ❤️
- The lunch plate on the round white-cloth-covered conference table surrounded by colleagues, though I suppose that actually looks more like a pillow
- The heated massage table where I’m getting a divine lymphedema massage, but I don’t want to fall asleep and miss it
- The slatted bench outside Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center
- The chair in the corner by the coffee pots at the NYAC Conference Center
- The plastic chair at the Pequot Library during an accordion orchestra concert, during which even Sousa sounds like a lullaby
Then she wrote: “This everything-looks-like-a-bed problem is the main reason it’s been two months since you’ve heard from me. I am still doing some things, some of them BIG! But in between, I mostly sleep.”
I immediately replied to her Caring Bridge post, claiming “first dibs” on a new poem that I plan to write in Karen’s honour to be titled, “Beds I have Known.”
But then, near the end of her marvellous message to her friends, Karen posted something that moved me to tears, and reminded me of something in the Aha ‘Aina Wai Maka (“Feast of Tears”) bulletin insert this Sunday: The Aha ‘Aina Wai Maka is seen as a happy occasion, a time when death was accepted by the family.
Here is what Karen wrote that moved me to happy tears:
“Today is All Saints, the day when Christians remember those who have gone before us, especially those who have helped make us who we are. Every All Saints I write a list in my planner of the people I will be overjoyed to see once I’m on the other side of the veil.”
When my time comes, Oh Lord, I want to be in that number of all the saints who come marching in to hang out with Karen once she passes to the Other Shore.
For now, there is a poem to write for a beloved friend.