INVITING THE SACRED INTO THE SECULAR: RITUAL AND GRACE IN THE MARKETPLACE

Southcoast Health©, a community based health delivery system in the Southeastern region of Massachusetts and East Bay, Rhode Island, offers multiple access points within an integrated continuum of health services that allow patients in the South Coast region of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts access to multiple services including Cancer, Heart, Orthopedic, Pediatric, Trauma and the myriad health issues, which afflict not only the sick but the people in their lives.

For the purposes of this post, I will concentrate on the Cancer Care Centers at Southcoast Health, whose protocols align with cancer centers that rank first in the nation - M.D. Anderson Physicians Network in Texas, Sloan Kettering in New York, Dana Faber in Boston, Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, all premiere treatment centers that offer patients the care they need at a critical time in their lives. Southcoast Health Cancer patients are treated in two state of the art cancer care facilities with a defragmented approach to treatment in the South Coast region of and sustained by a non faith-based, not-for-profit health system close to home in their own communities. Additionally, patients have benefited from the protocols integrated with excellent safety and quality measures and compassionate care by clinicians and staff who dedicate their energy and abilities to patient wellness. To these people, death is the enemy.

In creating the dedication ceremony of its newest and largest facility for cancer care, Southcoast Health System administrators wanted to craft an innovative and creative opening event but struggled with the content of the event. Southcoast Health espouses the arts and believes that they impact the wellness of its patients in very real ways. Artists often donate their time and talent Southcoast Health System; the result may be viewed throughout the hallways and corridors of the hospitals, clinics and treatment centers. Two of the three Southcoast’s hospitals house grand pianos in their gathering places, so that patients and visitors may hear live music played by local musicians as they enter the spaces.

As the dedication date crept closer and closer and no one seemed to gain momentum or produce a plan of action, I knew that Southcoast’s administration would welcome a proposal that raised their own bar of artistic conviction and bring it to the next level. I began to imagine a ritual that integrated a narrative with original music and art for the dedication event. Envisioning a ‘liturgy’ for a non faith-based, not-for-profit health system, I imagined a created a ceremonial “rite” that honored not only what the new Center would mean for thousands of people but include art, music and a testimony by a parent whose son had died of leukemia before the Center was built. In short, I invited grace into the marketplace.

Quite by chance, I came upon an original painting called Tree of Life, created by a South Coast artist Joshua Oliveira. The oil painting merged swirling circles of shades and hues that moved colors in vertical and horizontal patterns to surround a bare tree, the dominant figure in the piece. To my eye, the painting alluded that it takes a community of every color and shape to generate one single piece of creation. A cornerstone of my imagined ritual began to shape itself around this painting. I contacted the artist, outlined my idea and persuaded him to tithe Tree of Life to Southcoast Health, which he willingly did, passing up several offers from buyers who wanted to purchase the painting. There really are living saints of God among us.

The arts move hearts to transcend beyond what we intellectualize to stir us in our souls. I asked myself if I possessed the courage to propose and create an encounter with the living God outside of my own comfort zone on behalf of people who suffer. When I am sent forth from the celebration of the Eucharist to love and serve the Lord, do I risk putting myself out there and trust the community of saints to walk with me as I follow the creative breadth of the Spirit when it moves me into unfertilized holy ground?  Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Now my ‘liturgy’ needed a narrative and music.  I called a dear friend and colleague, George Campeau, a South Coast veteran pastoral musician with over 50 years of experience in a plethora of contexts who fully understood the journey that accompanies cancer when it strikes close to home. Both he and his wife Diane, both from the South Coast region lost their son Justin to leukemia. Justin was 21 years old and in his third year as a viola performance major at the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut. His future looked so promising until he became ill; he possessed a beautiful gift. George and Diane’s nomadic journey during Justin’s treatment resembled that of Sarah and Abraham as they pitched their temporary tent with a religious community near the University of Connecticut Medical Center, where Justin’s initial treatment began and where he received the Sacrament of the Sick. Transferring Justin to Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute for a bone marrow transplant added more duress to their odyssey. George and Diane’s took turns traveling 55 miles, back and forth day and night between home and the Boston hospital so that Justin would know the comforting presence of one parent at all times. George summed up the physical exhaustion added to the worry and emotional trauma of the experience: “We were numb.”

The Campeau family experienced the outcome of the Sending Forth of the Eucharist as the Body of Christ outpoured its physical presence, affection and fiscal support to sustain them through Justin’s crisis. Musician friends offered their time and talent to create a benefit string concert, along with a successful bone marrow donor drive and numerous financial contributions to assist George and Diane with Justin’s medical expenses. After exhausting every attempt to rescue Justin from leukemia, he fell out of his hospital bed and severely injured his head. After a 4-hour surgery, Justin was placed on the life support with minimal survival potential. His parents removed him from life support soon thereafter. Justin died. After the death of his son, George, ever the musician, learned to play Justin’s viola, to keep the memory of his son and his music alive.

Real life narratives and well executed music unlock emotion in a way that even the finest rhetoric cannot. As I imagined the marriage of text and tune to reallocate a powerful story from the sacred realm in its spiritual context and shape it into a secular event, I went out on a limb and asked George a question. “If Southcoast Cancer Centers could have treated Justin, would you and Diane have brought Justin home for his treatments rather than undergo the grueling travel and stay between New Bedford and Boston? “Of course,” George responded immediately. “There would have been no need for us to do differently.” I seized the moment and very consciously asked my friend to rake up a wound that never heals. “Would you be willing and able to tell your story to a gathering of people at the dedication of the new center?” George never hesitated. “Yes,” he replied. I mustered more audacity and posed the final and most daring question of all. “If I wrote a piece for string quartet, piano and solo viola and called it Tree of Life, would you tell your story and then play the piece on Justin’s viola? Talk about it with Diane and pray about it. Take your time to decide.”

A day later, George called me. “So when I play the coda, I think that I should take it up an octave.” My heart leapt. “Does that mean you’ll do this?” “Yes,” George confirmed. “I’ll give the talk and Diane will stand next to me but she does not feel as though she can speak.” Sometimes the most powerful thing we do is simply to be present and embody a soul whom we loved in this life and sent ahead to God, especially when that person may be one’s own child. I knew that I asked my friends to revisit and reflect upon the most profound and excruciating event of their lives and the ultimate loss and grief for anyone. George and Diane’s response filled me with deep admiration for their faithful valor to act on behalf of some of the least of God’s people – the sick and the suffering. This is our call as the baptized, the reason why we are sent forth week after week from the celebration of Eucharist, to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” From the celebration of the sacred, do we take that mandate seriously and bring that sacred realm into the secular marketplace to continue the mission of Jesus Christ? How do we cooperate with the creative breadth of gifts that the Spirit of God affords us when we live within God’s grace? Where do we locate and integrate our stories in scriptural ‘real time’?

After composing an original piece for piano, solo viola and string quartet, I could now ‘pitch’ my dedication ritual to the administrators at Southcoast Health. After receiving word that we would move forward, I met with many people over several months to plan and discuss particulars. One of the meetings took place inside a construction trailer at the site of the new center. As we all wore our hard hats as required by law when visiting a construction location, I looked at healthcare providers and staff gathered around the table and familiar words resonated within.

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).  

Moving the sacred into the secular demands a hardhat. It means that we might dodge a few falling live wires and hit a steel beam and bear an injury. If we’re not wearing the bruises, then we’re not doing liturgy. Moving the sacred into the secular means leaving that the ‘safe zone’ with the confidence that God lives not just in our churches but in all people, believers and non believers, in all places, in all of creation. Igniting the combustible gas-soaked rags of ritual means stretching people who may have no idea what or who we invoke but respond, “Yes, we’ll do that your way,” and cooperate with something so much bigger than ourselves. Put your hard hat on when you tread on holy ground. Anything can happen.

At the dedication event, the new center full of South Coast residents eager to see the facility and staff that would act on their behalf, we gathered the assembly. Beginning with a brief introduction by the president of Southcoast Health System, we plunged a death-defying rite of inspired art, heart-wrenching narrative and sonorous original music that actualized the Paschal Mystery within a secular gathering of those who fight death, some who embrace death, other people who accept death or try to delay death. George’s words, “Beauty and pain often coexist,” gave passage to the premiere performance of the piece Tree of Life as Josh’s painting rested on an easel near George, who played Justin’s viola, and my quintet. The water of life poured out of hearts and eyes of all present.

Over the years as we worked together on diocesan conference events or shared experiences within our own pastoral contexts, George and I always noted that when a powerful homily cracked wide and exposed the living Word coupled with a lavish fare of rich music, the feast of grace feeds hungry hearts who yearn to walk with a community of saints that bolster them with unseen but very tangible presence within sacred terrain. We celebrated the victory over death in the living witness of George and Diane in a cancer care center, the very location where death looms on a daily basis. Despite the wide range of believers and non-believers present at that event, the Word dwelt among us and became tangible to all participants. “The bar has been raised on dedications,” one participant commented. I understood. Never again will an event that this health care system issues will be void of the grace of God, even though some will still remain staunchly loyal to their system of disbelief in anything beyond themselves. No matter. ‘Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” (Roman 14:8)

One of the sentences in George’s talk will forever remain in my memory: “We rejoice that Justin was and continues to be our son.” Here stood two parents undergoing the crushing death of loss and standing victorious before us all because of their belief in the Paschal Mystery within a secular non-faith based institution. How much more real does the Sending Forth get? Despite the ultimate loss of their son, George and Diane obdurately believe that ‘the souls of the just are in the hand of God.” (Wisdom 3: 1). They continue to walk with Justin in the land of the living, building the reign of God here and now, in this time and place, in the service of those souls still with us in their bodies and those who walk in the land of the living where we cannot see them but know they live more surely now and only a veil away. Although he died early, Justin is at rest, because “the age that is honorable comes not with the passing of time nor can it be measured in terms of years.” (Wisdom4: 7).

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55-57 New International Version)