Category: Life

Music for the Dying…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

The breathing was labored, but the room was quiet. Outside were the voices of staff doing their various good works. Inside there was a person completing the last leg of their journey with Alzheimer’s. Slowly but surely the time to go was coming. When Alzheimer’s takes someone it’s most often like this, quiet, very little sense of trauma, as if the disease was trying to apologize for all the crazy rough stuff along the way it decides to let go slowly, gently even into that good night.

A little voice inside said it was time to visit, to play a bit of music and to sing for the dying person down the hall. I even cut my program for the living a bit short so I could attend at the bedside and do something, perhaps, to make this part of the path a little lighter.

I’ve shared music with all kinds of people in my life from the time I was in grade school until now in my middle age. Some have applauded, some have not, some have told me how good I was and others have told me that I just didn’t “fit” in their group. I’ve made music for audiences that rocked and audiences of quiet older people just trying to stay awake. Still, the music for the dying, this audience of a single person most often without the capacity for response, are the most important audiences of all because yours is the last music they might hear.

So what to do? A little beautiful noodling to start, nothing to complex because this is no place to try to riff some experiment. Then what? Your heart has to be the guide and mine said “Simple”. Amazing Grace, done slowly with the intent to make sure the music doesn’t drown out the words. All the verses because they’re all that good. Then Jesus Loves Me for the very same reasons and who is more weak and in need of Jesus’ strength than a person who is dying. Finally a little more beautiful noodling and one more verse of Jesus Loves Me.

Then silence, the continued labored breathing, and the sound of the nurses in the hall doing their charitable work. No applause, not even someone opening their eyes. Yet that’s okay. A hundred years from now no one will remember even if I had somehow managed to score a Top 100 hit. I pray, though, that in some way the person on the bed across from my chair remembers, and perhaps God, too, on that soon coming day. It’s time to rest, this person made in the image of God from their labors and me, for a short while, to take a break before the needs of others need attention.

Inside, I wish I could cry. Outside, I put on my best smile and head out of the room and down to the hall to the others waiting for me.

To Be Honest…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

I’m disappointed with America right now, what we’ve become, the lengths it seems we’ve fallen from the good and how what is happening with us affects the larger world. Our freedom is becoming more and more about license and entitlement, our wealth is less about charity and more about hoarding, and our technology is slowly changing from servant to master. Our chief exports seem to be war and moral decay. Our chief imports are whatever toys we can get the poor and oppressed of the world to make for us at a price point to occupy us while our hearts empty and the world around us burns.

Trump and Clinton, we like to point out their mistakes, their scandals, their moral challenges, but they are us and we are them. They are a mirror for all of us and yet we don’t seem to understand that the person we see as we look is actually ourselves. We’ve got some rough years ahead and we may never remember to pull the chute as we free fall because we’re so busy looking at our phones on the way down.

The sadder part is that while this has been happening the church has often been the chaplain for the whole process of decay. Many churches are deeply compromised and, in fact, have become places where there is a veneer of Christian ritual covering a substance that is deeply and profoundly disconnected from the actual content of the Faith itself. Where there is a substance of Faith there is often a mass complacency to the real nature of the times, a denial of what is really happening around us and a bunker mentality that increasingly isolates us from the people who need us most, the lost, the confused, the massive numbers of people who are victims of these times.

Someone, and I forgot who it was said “Americans will do the right thing, after they’ve done everything else.” I think there is some truth to this. Perhaps, in time, the pain we’ve brought on ourselves from our continuing experiments in selfishness and decadence will finally get to be so high that some of us will start to think the unthinkable, the possibility that we were wrong when we thought that getting rid of the standards tested in time and the crucible of real world experience, the traditions if you will, was a bad idea. Already the cracks in our new world order are beginning to show and eventually even massive doses of TV and weed will not be able to medicate the pain.

Until that time we in the church need to strive as best as we broken people can to live the gift we’ve been given and share it at every opportunity. The times call for courageous, loving, and transparent people to stand for something that is very unpopular right now, the idea that there are things in the human experience that transcend the individual, things larger and more true than any emotion, purchase, urge, or perceived need. Your culture will find ways, at the present, to punish you for this because you will be, wherever you are, the child that reminds the emperors of this world that they really don’t have any clothes. Your mere presence will be an irritant to those who plan on making fortunes for themselves while the culture goes bankrupt, forgetting of course that the bankrupt culture will eventually make paupers of them as well. The way you live your life will be an affront to people who believe that power over others is the way to their utopia by eliminating the dissent that reminds them of their own emptiness.

So, there is hope but it will be hope realized in long term, peaceful, and activist struggle. The struggle of those who are looking for sanity to achieve it for themselves and then the struggle to change the world around them by sharing that sanity one person at a time until it prevails. Those who choose to take on the struggle will need to understand that for years they may have to be on the outside looking in as they make the deliberate choice to live as exiles in their own land until the day its soul destroying tendencies can be healed. For the churches that remain faithful there will have to be an almost entire change of vision, a reorientation towards the understanding that this America is already a pagan land, as it were, and that, far from being acceptable and normal in these times, we are a community often at radical dissonance with the world around us, a revolutionary body who have been called to be salt and light in ways that will make us uncomfortable as we are torn from our isolation and complacency. In the end only the churches that have refused to baptize the brokenness of this culture will have any meaning, substance, or even existence and we have to daily make a choice what kind of church we will be.

I’m disappointed in America right now. While in the larger and eternal scheme of things nations don’t matter because they’re temporary entities subject to change they can, in any one moment of time, be part of the larger human good. Right now this America I live in is often not. The only remedy I can see is to be fully a citizen of my actual and permanent country, the observant Christian will understand what I am saying, and that by doing so transform my temporary one.

Long live the revolution!

 

The Class of ’79

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

I had the chance to meet a member of my high school class a short while ago. We had both found our way to the hot tub in our health club and, while it took a second, we recognized each other and began to talk.

We talked about knees, mine, hers, the operations we had or anticipated. When only a few years have passed since high school people talk about jobs, success, cars, and such. As the years pass we talk about children, grandchildren, and knees that don’t quite work the same way as they did when we were younger. I suppose that in the years to come those of us who remain will talk about those who have passed on and one day there will only be one of us left to remember anything at all. Such is the nature of things.

In some ways my high school days seem like they really were decades ago, and sometimes it seems like an instant. I was new to town and so I didn’t have the advantage of history with people that’s so important when you try to fit in in a small town, and although the town I went to high school in was a metropolitan suburb, it was also a small town. My father’s job, a good job for him and us, uprooted me from the place where I had grown and I don’t think I ever was successfully transplanted to the new garden.

So high school was often odd and lonely for me and I certainly don’t look back at it as some kind of “Glory days.” It’s hard to be forced by law and geography to be at a place where you don’t feel you belong and combining that with all the craziness that is adolescence was sometimes overwhelming. There are days when even now I wish I could have somehow stayed in my hometown with the people who knew me from when I was a kid, the people I had to leave suddenly in the middle of 8th grade. That place wasn’t perfect either, no place is, but sometimes when I walked the high school halls alone I wished I was somewhere, anywhere, else and the place I left behind seemed as good a place as any.

Thirty plus years out from high school, of course, everything is different. Time and maturity do their work and wisdom helps you gain perspective. High school was hard for me but it also helped me grow strong, become a caring person, and provided the storm that made the calm that followed even more sweet. I left the place like a rocket launching into the air and I’ve kept climbing. A substantial part of who I am now is rooted in that time, the largest part, I suppose, just the sheer determination to prove to the world that the person they saw in those days was never going to be my destiny and that there was, and is, so much more. Knowing what it was like to hurt, and hurt badly, my whole life from those days has been about healing, my own, and, even more than that, doing whatever I could to see healing happen wherever I happened to be. It helped make me a Priest, and a caregiver, and a person fiercely passionate about the amazing power of Jesus to transform lives, even reality itself. Though I was often a stranger at my own high school I’d like to think that if they saw me now they would know that things have worked out well, thank God.

Still, I don’t keep track of many of the people from my high school class. I know some of them have died and from time to time I meet one here and there. It’s in my nature to have only a few close friends. It’s not that I don’t like people, my work is such that I’m surrounded by them every day and I probably know, or have known, hundreds of people all around the world. My inner circle, by my own preference, is just small. Still, I do pray for my high school class often, sometimes at church and more often when God wakes me up in the middle of the night to pray. I wish them well, I really do, and I wish them all the blessings and good things this life has to offer. I hope they are at peace and sometimes when I ponder things I think about what they may be doing or where they are and I hope the life they have is wonderful in the best sense of that word.

So it was good, this chance meeting in the health club hot tub with an old classmate. I remember her as a good person, still is, and we talked about knees, hers, mine, and ours, the kind of talk you get from people in their middle age. The thoughts of that chance encounter are the seed of what I’ve written and I pray, too, that her life has been, and will be blessed.

God is good, all the time, and because of His goodness to me I wish every one in the Mahtomedi High School Class of 1979 all of His blessings as well, peace in this world and heaven in the world to come. This coming Sunday I’ll do what I’ve often done before and light a candle at church with your names on it.

 

 

 

Death and Wisdom

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

In a little over a month three people in my parish have passed away. One was a venerable Archdeacon, a good man full of years. He had served His Lord and the Church for decades and passed peacefully in his sleep. The other two were young, a high school boy full of promise tragically taken in a car accident, and a man in his early twenties who reposed in the Lord after a brave battle with illness.

Three deaths in three different ways. Death is ingenious like that, it has the ability to come in as many ways as there are people to visit and no one, regardless of their age or station, is immune. We expect, in the normal course of life, for those along in years to die but even the young can, and do, leave this life. We have seen it, first hand, as December has given way to the new year.

There are no answers in all of this, at least not in the short term. We know, in each case, the cause of death but the greater questions of “Why?” will take time to ponder. It always does. Death challenges pious platitudes and easy answers because death has a profound depth to it, a great mystery in the best sense of that word, and easy answers seem to fall apart in the face of it.

Death is also, though, a forge of wisdom with the power to clarify the true value of things and burn through everything superficial. The knowledge that this time on earth is limited can be a source of frivolity where all of our efforts are focused on extracting fleeting glimpses of whatever we consider the good life in a mad dash before the deadline. It can also be a source of paralysis and despair where the idea of the inevitable end clouds every part of every point along the way. Or it can call us to something higher, to search for, and practice, the good, the true, the things that transcend the moment, and even life itself. If that is the course we choose, then, perhaps, even death, as mysterious and powerful and challenging as it is, has something to offer us in this life.

 

Time and the Dead….

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ 1 Comment

In this past month we’ve had two sad deaths in our parish and the grieving has had me ponder what time must be like for those who are in the nearer presence of Christ.

First, though, a note. I used the title “Time and the Dead” for this post because it was kind of catchy, almost like a name for a rock band, but the Orthodox understanding of death is that the body dies, something we consider to be a temporary condition because we believe that the body will also, at some future time, be resurrected, and the soul continues on, for the faithful, in the presence of God. So we use the term “dead” not so much as the idea of being completely extinguished as an entity but rather as a temporary separation of the body and the soul awaiting the resurrection and the transformation of all of who we are to our final state.

What led me to ponder the sense of time for those who have passed on were quotes and thoughts that came from the events of this month and around Facebook at this time of year about those who have passed on spending Christmas in heaven. I understand the sentiment, when my father and brother died I thought of that as well, how they would be spending events like Christmas and Pascha in the presence of Christ. There’s a certain peace that comes with knowing that the joy that we can experience in these feasts is a foretaste of the joy of being in God’s nearer presence.

Still, those sentiments, as good as they are, come from the reality that we are creatures of time. Yes, eternity is in our hearts, but we live in time and so we see things that way. Yet, I wonder if those who are in the presence of Christ also see things that way? I’m inclined to believe they don’t, but what I am writing is speculation out loud and the reader should take it as that. The truth is that we’re never given precisely detailed descriptions of what life beyond this life entails and so our thoughts and hearts can travel to that existence but it would be hard to claim extensive knowledge. If only Lazarus had written a book!

From the stories of the Transfiguration of Christ we know that those who are departed to be with God have some sense of what is happening here. Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus, in one reading of that story, about what Jesus was to accomplish so there seems to be some kind of consciousness “over there” , as it were, of life “back here”. Over the centuries, as well, we, as Orthodox Christians have experienced the reality of the intercessions, not mediations, of the Saints, answers in our own lives of our requests for those who have gone to be with Christ to pray for us. The writer of Hebrews also uses the image of a stadium where people are in the stands are watching, as a cloud of witnesses, those of us who are currently living the Christian life. So, somehow, in a holy and blessed way, those who have departed this life have a kind of consciousness about what is happening here and, in certain cases, individual lives of the faithful.

In pondering that, though, I speculate that those who are with Christ, even as they can, as God allows, be witness to us as we live out lives in time are probably not aware of time as we are. God has no time in the sense that we measure  it as one moment processing on to another. I don’t think there are clocks in heaven. Perhaps in hell although I can’t say that for sure, but probably not in heaven. To God, if I understand this correctly, all of what we call time is present. There is no past as we understand it with God, or for that matter the future. Now that doesn’t mean that God isn’t aware that we live in time or that God is incapable of entering human time, but rather that God isn’t bound by time and God’s vision of existence and reality isn’t necessarily framed by what we call time. I remember in my seminary days of one professor describing God as “timeful” that is everything in existence is always present to God.

So my presumption, and presumption it is, is that those who have departed to be with God in a state of blessedness also share in that timefulness. Their consciousness, I believe, is not limited by time as we understand it. So, for example, when the time comes for us to repose from this life those who know and love us who proceeded us won’t be saying “It’s been thirty years, glad you finally made it” because there the idea of anything like “years” is something that simply doesn’t exist. I think, by the way, that this is one reason those who have departed this life can be very effective intercessors for us, because they can pray for us with an understanding of existence not limited by our moment to moment sense of time and events. They can see a larger picture, a vision of things not trapped by our understandings of time and the meaning of things within that context, but rather with a “God’s eye view” of the entire panorama of existence where all events are present from the creation of everything that exists to its fulfilment in God at the end of time as we understand it.

Such heady things to be pondering in the wee, small, hours of a Sunday in December. And if these are only glimpses, what must the fullness of what God would have for us in His presence be like?

For Your Consideration…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

If you are looking for a charity to support or an almsgiving opportunity as you prepare for Christmas please consider Jakob. This young man is a member of the parish I serve and his cause is the real deal. His struggle with illness defines courage and whatever you could do to help would be appreciated. Thank you.

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https://www.gofundme.com/sh6z66ad

 

 

Pray for Charlie…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

Pray, first, because we are more alike than different. Given the money, fame, and access, which one of can say with certainty that we could have kept the powers of sin, struggle, and addiction away from our lives? Even without them we often fall so it is perhaps a grace that we don’t have more and thereby increase our risk.

Pray, again, because more than likely that wealth and access will be quickly gone and the fame will grow very shallow. There will be lawsuits by those who were deceived and damaged. There will be opportunities lost and expenses incurred. When the good times stop the good time friends may disappear, replaced by a kind of loneliness softened only by the discovery of those who were true and good all the time.

Pray, some more, because these wonderful drugs that keep people alive also rule the lives of those who take them. Life is measured by the dates and times and doses and everything must be done with great precision and little spontaneity Far away from the lights and the public persona there will always be a Charlie who knows that his life hangs by a pharmaceutical thread and even the lowest of viral loads doesn’t mean that this infection is gone, just hidden somewhere in a quiet spot where the current tests still can’t reach. This will be his life.

Pray, as well, because the potential of his life is still enormous. Sanity, health, and wholeness are often found through difficult circumstances and as long as there is life there is always hope. Truly, as St. Augustine is reputed to have said “There is no Saint without a past or a sinner without a future.”  God is not done with any one of us and neither is he done with Mr. Sheen.

Pray, finally, for ourselves. Seeing someone struggle and bear the consequences of that struggle should never elicit any thought or emotion in us save for humility in knowing that we, too, are capable of our own kinds of struggles, sins, and darkness. Yes, perhaps this was not our particular sin but we each have our own and in their own way they are deadly to us as well.

If he were here, I guess I would say only this to Charlie,  “God loves you more than you can possible imagine and His grace is greater than any darkness you or I may wrestle with in our lives. There is better for you if you want it and God’s door is always open.”

I Live in a World of Rage…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

born of selfishness and entitlement unfulfilled. All around me the world I live in shouts “What you feel is what is real and what you feel you need is what the rest of the world is obligated to provide.” When this is not true, which is more often the case than not, I am told that raging against whatever is outside of me that has failed my feelings is my right, my obligation even, until the ever-changing feelings and needs inside of me are satiated.

I reject this even as I understand that in doing so it can be like a fish rejecting water. This is the ocean I swim in, the river that is my home, and the pond where I was born, and yet I know this, all around me, is not the real world even as it surrounds me everywhere. So I resist as I can, asking God for peace, for insight, and a sense of eternity in the world of time. My own world is too small and it is constantly unsettled and angry because of its smallness and in moments when I am distant from the Truth I can feel the anger of my tiny world’s unfulfilled entitlement swelling inside until I am ready to burst.

I must die, daily even, to this small world and its rage. Daily I must recall its illusions, its shadows, and its emptiness. Instead of the thousand shouting voices all around me telling me  to burn and hate and consume and make war I must listen to the one voice that matters, the still, small, voice that comes after the storm and earthquakes and fire have passed. That is the voice of God. The rest is madness.

 

 

Above All There is Christ…

~ Fr. John Chagnon ~ Leave a comment

This life, this Christian way, is not a path for cowards. Our Lord was not joking when he told his followers they would have to, if they wished to be with him, “Take up their cross…” and the longer you travel along this Beautiful Path the more you will see of just that.

Still, although there are often temptations to step back from the challenges, go with the flow, and somehow find a way to walk without always having to face into the wind there is, above all, Christ.

There is a deep and profound beauty in Jesus, a vibrant and lively truth, and a sense of eternity embodied in Him that endures through time. When we draw close to Him there is a deep blessedness and even when we wander away there is still a light and hope  that can draw us through the darkness.

In this world, our Lord says, we will have many troubles but his voice also adds this calm assurance “Do not fear for I have overcome the world…”. Banged up and bruised, crawling through the night if that’s the best we can do, we remain his and he is ours and those who truly understand this can never go back.