May 19th: Communicating What Matters Most, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.
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Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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Communicating What Matters Most with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: What Makes For A Good Life? A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Psalm 90.
Join us this Sunday as we explore how confronting our mortality can lead to a deeper embrace of life. Our guest speaker Elizabeth Johnson will share about reimagining end-of-life care to prioritize community support. She founded the Peaceful Presence Project to transform how we talk about and experience illness, death and grief. Elizabeth emphasizes in her work that we all have a role to play in caringJoin us this Sunday as we explore how confronting our mortality can lead to a deeper embrace of life. Our guest speaker, Elizabeth Johnson, will share about reimagining end-of-life care to prioritize community support. She founded the Peaceful Presence Project to transform how we talk about and experience illness, death, and grief. Elizabeth emphasizes in her work that we all have a role to play in caring for one another through life’s most challenging times. for one another through life’s most challenging times.
Transcript:
We’re continuing our worship series on what makes a good life. What makes a good life is knowing that someday it will end. confronting our own mortality can actually lead to a deeper embrace of life, and an awakening to the gift of each breath and the gift of every single heartbeat. Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, Our goal should be to live, to live life in radical amazement, to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that that takes nothing for granted. It’s not just another day, this day is a gift given to you. To be spiritually said is to be amazed. Being in conversation with death, can lead to living life, with radical amazement, taking nothing for granted, helping us remember what’s really important in life. In her poem, when death comes Mary Oliver contemplates her death. And it helps her realize how she actually wants to live. And she wrote When death comes, when it’s over, I want to say all my life, I was a bride. Married to amazement, I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made my life something particular and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world, the psalmist in Psalm 90 wrote, teach us to number our days, that we might gain a full heart of wisdom. The Psalmist is suggesting we would have more wisdom to live well. If we were willing to talk openly, and honestly about death, and what it might mean to die. Well, you know, we live in a death denying culture. And what I’ve noticed about our refusal to become friends with the reality of death is that most of us are unprepared when it comes time for our own transition from what I call this life, to more life. And most of us are unprepared and unequipped to accompany those we love and meaningful and healing ways at at such critical and sacred moments in people’s lives. And how easy it is to take the gift of life for granted. So today, I am deeply grateful to have an open and honest conversation with Elizabeth Johnson. Elizabeth is the co founder and executive director of a community based organization called the peaceful presence project. She’s a sister, partner, bereaved mother, and lover of honest conversations. And her current favorite word is inter vulnerability, because of the healing potential that exudes when when we actually meet each other in those deep, very human places of vulnerability. So, Elizabeth, welcome. And I’m glad that you’re here. And I’m glad we can have this conversation. And I thought we might begin by inviting you to tell us a little bit about the peaceful presence project. I mean, what is its mission? What’s its vision? Well, it’s great to be here with you. So the peaceful presence project is a community based organization. We have our roots here in Central Oregon, but we work statewide. And our mission is really about reimagining and transforming the way that communities talk about, plan for and experience the later stages of life. So experiences of illness of death of grief. And our vision is really about creating a culture where every community member has the ability to receive compassionate, equitable end of life care, that we’re really centering those experiences. And as communities, all stepping in and playing a part in the care for those that live alongside of us during these more challenging windows.
You mentioned reimagining, can you can you say a little bit about why we need to reimagine Sure well, just as you opened up with right we live in a culture that simply does not enjoy remembering or standing close to the reality that we’re mortal beings. And that this will all come to an end at some point. And I think that, you know, we really in so many ways beautifully by Write in more medical interventions to to make our lives easier and oftentimes to prolong life. But also what’s happened in that is that we have, I think, change the narrative around the dying process to say, it’s it’s not our, or we don’t have the ability or the unpowered stance to really know how to be in the dying process with the grief process. And so reimagining is really about, um, kind of changing the narrative, and rethinking what our relationship to those essential life experiences what that looks like.
It sounds like in some ways, it’s a shift from oftentimes we view death as, as in some ways a failure. Even from the medical perspective, it’s, it’s a failure, as opposed to seeing death as actual part of the developmental process of life. Yeah. And how do you think reimagining death in such a way might change our relationship to our own dying? Well, I think about it and the arc of the life, right that there, as you said, there’s these very integral pieces of learning of wisdom development of, of coming closer and closer to who we are as a soul in the world. And those later stage windows being so essential to that learning, yet, we don’t want to we don’t want to spend time there. We don’t want to linger there, right? We can, we can talk about an age friendly community, but we have hard time talking about death friendly communities. And, yeah, so I think that the reimagining is really a reclamation of the Ark of our lives and say that it all matters, right, we need to have, we need to have a relationship with each and every day, all the way through that last breath, right. And the Tibetan Book of dying reminds us that in order to live well, we need to know how to die well. So we start at the end of that life, and then we work our way back into the middle of our lives where we find ourselves today. Kind of reminds me I think part of part of how I define spirituality isn’t necessarily about getting our beliefs, right, or making sure we’ve earned our ticket to heaven. But it’s really about awakening, you know, awakening to a greater reality, but also awakening to ourselves, awakening to the gift of each breath, awakening to the gift of each heart beat. And part of what I’m hearing you sound we’re hearing you say is to befriend death, in some ways is to awaken us to the gift of life.
I’ve heard you talk a lot about compassionate communities model. I’d like to learn a little bit more about that, and particularly how we as a faith community, how such a model might be important for us as we you know, as we are with people in times of illness and dying and death and grief, what what is the compassionate communities? Model? Yes, well, this is the the model of care that our organizations actually founded upon. Six compassionate committees model of care, oftentimes, it’s referred to as public health palliative care. And really what it teaches us is that experiences of illness, death, dying, grief, bereavement, all of this really is the is the responsibility of, of communities, right, that we’ve relegated those care experiences more to social services or the health system. But really, it’s it’s about transforming and again, reimagining the role that communities can play for one another in these spaces. And when our teachers, Alan Callahan reminds us that death and dying are social events, with medical components. We’ve been taught, right, that they’re their medical events that have the secondary or tertiary social event. But really, how do we recenter this and say that we all have an essential role to play for one another. There’s also something known as the 95 five rule. But research shows that when an individual’s navigating a serious or terminal illness, typically only 5% of their time, is spent face to face with a medical provider. So the question for all of us, right is what are we doing with that, and the other 95% of the time what’s happening in that space? We know right, that the death and bereavement these experiences are at the core social, the relational, their spiritual. And so I think the I think there’s a good news aspect of the compassionate communities model of care, which is that we all have a very empowered stance to play in that space for one another. And I think especially for faith communities, that already have these existing threads of connection And Right, right, that, that we’re asking ourselves, what happens in those in between spaces? When somebody is home? Right, what happens after the memorial occurs? You know, we oftentimes are focused on the event itself, the Dine, the coming together and celebrating the life. But what happens after that? And how do I think faith communities are just so well positioned to come into a room together and ask those big questions around? How else might we care for one another, in these in these big kind of transitory windows that will happen to all of us grief, and death will happen at the center of all of our lives. I mean, what I mean, just what a transformational idea that I mean, we, in the faith community, part of what our mission is about is being the presence of what we would call in the Christian community be in the presence of, of Christ’s love in people’s lives. So this whole idea that, that, that even the dying process and death, not necessarily being a medical event, but a social event, and that we actually have the responsibility as well as the sacred privilege to show up, and to be a presence of love and care and healing and such sacred and, and critical time. Kind of reminds when people come when people say to me, I’m gonna go and be with the person I love, they are dying. I often offer a blessing. I often say May you be graced with everything you need to be the presence of Love, that you desire to be. It’s easy for me to offer that blessing. But then what does that mean? So what, what is the practical wisdom and the resources that we might need to be that presence of care to be to show up to accompany people, whether it be illness or dying? Or even after someone dies in the grief process? What is that practical wisdom and the resources we need to be to accompany in ways that are that are helpful? Because we certainly can accompany people in ways that are less than helpful. So yeah, what is that wisdom or the resources that that would be helpful? Well, I think the first sort of challenge of this is that it starts with us. Right? I think back to early on, I had the gift of spending about two and a half years in India. And I remember a Rinpoche from the Buddhist Rinpoche saying to me, remember, always keep death close. And I thought, well, I What does that mean? You know, and then I was down in South America, and somebody came to me and said, you know, to keep death as your company at all your companion, to always feel death, they’re somewhere on your shoulder. And I think that we have to have a personal willingness to do to do the work of remembering the impermanence of of this life that we have, we cannot sit alongside, you know, a bedside of an individual who is dying, and be there Well, without actually having done the work ourselves. Right, that I am not othering. But I understand that your experience right now is my experience, because that is that is the heart of our humaneness, what we share here, so I think that’s, you know, the the first step around all of this is, what does it look like to integrate some level of practice on a daily basis, that continues to serve as this very gentle but true reminder that this will all end? Right. There’s another interesting aspect of this, you know, we know that the brain that the brain technically categorizes death, as something that will only happen to others. And I think it has to do something with the self preservation piece of us continuing to go on. So we have to, we have to kind of we have to sort of meet that with this intentional practice of being in our lives and knowing, you know, I too, will die someday. I to experience grief. And so I think that’s a essential starting point. We oftentimes, I think, kind of sell ourselves the story that I don’t I don’t know what to say, to make this better. I can’t go in the room because I will not have the right answer or the solution to offer up to this person who is dying the good death. And, you know, I think a lot of our work is about remembering that you know, we hold within ourselves exactly what it is that another needs and that is presence, as you said. So, you know, I think that’s the second piece is what does it look like to become comfortable enough in ourselves in, in the silence in the sacredness of what it is to share that space with somebody and to to enter the room from that place, my presence here being here, the simple presence of me is more than enough. And to know that most people who are navigating these experiences are, are experiencing the opposite of that this disenfranchisement, this alienation, isolation, retraction, right? We, we, we feel a fear in in the face of of death and grief, right, because it reminds us of our own mortality. And so to, to really, to know that you are at the core enough. And then third, you know, there’s there’s something referred to as death and grief literacy, you know, this competency that we can develop, that really helps us to have a just a more, you know, kind of grounded sense of what it looks like to show up. And that’s about, you know, non medical symptom management that we can offer for people, you know, coordination resources that are available to us to say, Great, we’re going to do the food, we’re going to, you know, to have the people come through and sit bedside and pray with you, we’re going to, in all kinds of logistical realities that are really difficult to hold for a family or an individual in these spaces. And so, there’s just a lot of learning that’s possible there. And that’s something that we as an organization are really trying attempting to bring back into the community, the practical wisdom is available around these spaces.
And I love that it kind of starts with recognizing that your very presence is a gift, you know, in in a, in a sentence or two, what would be your, your, your prayer, your blessing, your wish for us to be able to think about what it means to die well, so that we might actually live well. Well, I, I, I would love for us to remember on a cellular level that we need one another, that there is this interval durability, that is at its core, the power in these spaces, and to match that with but also remembering the the fragility, the the the fragility of life, right. And I think at that intersection, we find so much potential, so much love. Yeah, I love that I often think it’s, it’s not our strength, it’s not our successes that we share in common.
What we share most in common, is the salty taste of our own tears, you know, what we share most in common is, is our vulnerability, you know, and that the human soul doesn’t want to be fixed, saved, solved, converted, controlled. You know, the human soul wants to be seen and heard and affirmed. And I think it’s meeting each other I saw agree with you, I think it’s meeting each other in those those sacred spaces of vulnerability that we are able to see and, and to be seen, yeah.
I want to share these this beautiful, I’m a big fan of John O’Donoghue. And he has this wonderful he has a book called blessed the spaces between us, as you know. And he talks about death in this book and he says, to me, you quietly befriend your death so that you will have no need to fear when your time comes to turn and leave me the silent presence of your death. Call your life to attention wake you up to how scarce Your time is into the urgency to become free and equal to the call of your destiny. And may you gather yourself and decide carefully how you now can live the life that you would love to look back on from your own deathbed. Elizabeth, thank you so much for the work that you do the beautiful, important work that you do. And thank you so much for this conversation.
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