Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

It was a day in May, 1960 and we were now living in Pullman, Washington. I was in my first year as a faculty member of WSU and approaching my twenty-seventh birthday. As a staff counselor my office was in a remodeled barn, which explains why the offices were on the third floor and the restrooms inconveniently located on the second floor. It was a normal morning of counseling and I had quickly walked downstairs to “prepare for my next appointment,” our euphemism for saying, “I am going to the restroom.”

I stood at the urinal and was shocked to see my urine run red! I could not believe my eyes. I felt no pain, but the color was vivid. I panicked! My thoughts about my next client and the issues we were exploring were swept away. No longer was it a normal day. I tried to compose myself and quickly called our family doctor. I was in his office that afternoon and in Lewiston, Idaho the next day sitting across the desk from a urologist. That consultation would lead to a cystoscope exam. Ugh! Yikes! The first of many. The first time I urinated after the exam I nearly hit the ceiling. Later, it was the same, but at least I knew what to expect.

I spent ten days in that city at St. Joseph’s Hospital following a surgery for a bladder tumor. I watched as the catheter hanging by my bed gradually turned from bright red to a more normal yellow and played out several scenarios of my future during those long days and nights of vigil. Was this the result of the number of times I was hit by drill instructors during boot camp? Would I at a young age face life-threatening cancer? Was I to be cheated after finally finishing ten years of schooling and beginning to lead a normal life by encountering a serious medical problem?

I prayed a lot and slept little. While the catheter showed signs of pink, I learned with deep relief that the polyp was benign. Since the surgery was transurethral, I had no scar to heal, however the base of the polyp was large and bled for some time. My bloody urine was the first of a number of events in which my usually cooperative body would radically change my calendar.

All this is to say that events occurring in my body have a tremendous effect on who I am able to become in the next moment: from counselor enjoying a normal day to shocked young adult to hospital patient all in a matter of hours. Messages from my body are powerful persuaders. They can turn me upside down and inside out. They can influence future moments dramatically different than any that I had imagined. Surely, I had not planned to spend my May days in a hospital.

My body is a key participant in my center of creativity. It plays a powerful role in influencing how I create myself in the next moment. Considering the metaphor of a basketball team my body is not the center, God is, but it is a key guard who can set up the next play. I recall again the four primary persuaders in any moment of creation: God who initiates by offering me an invitation, my past, the world intersecting me, and my body. These latter three influence powerfully whether that divine invitation is ignored, modified, or accepted. It became clear to me early on that my body is capable of crying out loudly who I shall become.

I had long seen my body as something I simply commanded. I needed to do a task, stay up late, go to sleep or work long hours, the body did so. I was fortunate to have such a cooperative and strong body. My body did not loom large in my own consciousness. Yet, I have learned that my body is quite different than I had been treating it. Within my body are a vast array of cells, molecules, and atoms. Each of them is a center of creativity just as I have been describing myself. There is not a deep chasm of difference between my person—self, psyche, soul—and my body. One such difference is that I as a person do enjoy consciousness and entities in my body do not. I am a coordinator of my entire body, while a cell coordinates within its membrane walls. There are more similarities than difference since they are guided by the same process as I.

As I imagine a cell in my heart, I picture the influencing factors of its past, the nucleus, molecules, and atoms within the cell, the world intersecting it—largely other cells in its immediate vicinity—and God’s invitation for its next becoming. This cell is a center of creativity involved in a process of minute moments in which it creates what it will become in the next moment. The process sounds familiar! Sounds a lot like me! It is most likely to repeat what it has been in the past, carrying out its particular function in the body yet in any split second it may suddenly veer off in a different direction. It “feels” the pull of the invitation, the powerful push of the past, the world of adjacent cells, and from this mix, creates what it will be next.

If the universe is composed of innumerable bursts of creative energy, then it follows that they are also present within the body. Centers of creativity are everywhere! Given this new understanding I no longer see myself as commander and chief of an army of obedient soldiers. I feel my body as friend, partner, companion and fellow adventurer. We go it together or we don’t go at all. This leads me to great respect and gratitude for each of my bodily centers of creativity.

I am led to use the model of God to describe my relationship with my body. Just as God feels with me that which I feel, I may listen to my body with respect and caring. Just as God influences me, I may use persuasion with my body. I may become aware whether my body feels like walking the inclines of Skyline Drive or the more level road along Highline Canal. I may listen to determine if my body is ready for seventy or eighty pound weights on arm thrusts, one hundred or one hundred ten pounds on leg pushes, and thirty or thirty-five stomach bends as I work my way around the exercise equipment at the Wenatchee Valley College fitness center.

I am aware of how different this persuasive approach is from the earlier understanding in Western society that the mind is a totally different order than the body. This earlier visions persists as a vestige in our common language. We hear “mind-body.” My ophthalmologist spoke those words to me as he moved his examining equipment closer and closer to my wary and anxious eye. “Mind over matter, mind over matter.” We inherited the notion that the mind operates by higher principles, divine, spiritual or philosophical, while the body is mere matter. Little round indivisible solid particles bounce around, missing one another, colliding with one another, veering off one another, unable to move unless moved by another: Billiard balls on a pool table! Matter in motion! It is not hard to guess which part of us our culture valued the most!

It is no surprise that Thomas Aquinas, the great twelfth century theologian, called God “the Unmoved Mover.” Nothing else in all creation moved without being moved by another object. Nor is it surprising that Rene’ Descartes, the seventeenth century philosopher, said that the mind and body are run by different systems, different clocks if you will. The two systems are miraculously synchronized with one another. An implication of this view of the body is that animals were considered machines which feel no pain, thus it was acceptable to treat them harshly. How sad for those horses pulling the carriages of the royalty and the heavy produce carts of the serfs!

Before considering another crucial quality of our bodies, I wish to share several other bodily incidents which hit me like a load of bricks. I am glad that when they occurred I had embraced this new vision of the body, whereas I had not been introduced to this vision when my urine ran red.

I recuperated from my bladder surgery and faced regular cystoscopic exams, even years later after I moved to Wenatchee. There was a need to keep a keen eye on that location. There was good reason. When I was serving as pastor at Mercer Island and attending our church’s annual conference in Tacoma, lo, there was a small amount of blood in my urine again. I went into a tail spin and found it nearly impossible to be attentive to the proceedings. A cystoscopic exam soon determined that it was simply a scab breaking loose from a site they had earlier cauterized. What relief!

These earlier messages from my body were startling but not painful. The morning I had a gall bladder attack was! Never have I felt such nausea. I could not stand. My body yelled with utter intensity in the ensuing committee meetings, rendering other persuaders hardly audible. Adrienne drove me to the Wenatchee Valley Clinic and I was immediately guided to a wheel chair. The examinations there revealed the problem and I was admitted to Central Washington Hospital to have my gall bladder removed. My friend, Dr. Jerry Rappe’ a pathologist, who examined the removed organ said, “Bob, that’s the ugliest specimen I have ever seen!” Given those words, I was doubly glad to have it out, although I now have to think twice about whether I eat any food with a major fat content. Goodbye four cheese tortellini and Alfredo sauce!

I was a jogger, beginning with the 5BX plan of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Adrienne and I began timing laps of walking and running at the high school track a mere block from our earlier home. I expanded outward to the streets, jogging from home several miles up a gradual include on Methow Street toward the hills surrounding our valley. Pain in my right knee interrupted this routine. My body spoke loudly in those creative moments when my intention was to lace up my jogging shoes. The torn cartilage was repaired by arthroscopic surgery on Good Friday which allowed me to walk down the aisle of church on Easter Sunday. The only evidence of the surgery is two small circular scars on opposite sides of my leg.

After this short time away from jogging, I began to feel winded on these jaunts and became concerned enough to schedule an appointment with my doctor. . My physician called it “s.o.b.” shortness of breath, not to be confused with the expletive. No cause was evident. A year later after I had been required to choose a new primary care physician, Dr. Peter Rutherford, said, “Since you already had blood drawn this morning, let’s check you out on this one. It’s so rare that no one ever tests positive.” Well, of course, I did. I had hereditary emphysema, technically “Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency”. The name is a mouthful and it took me weeks to even learn how to say it, let alone spell or understand it.

Thus, began an adventure in medical treatment. The nearest medical facility specializing in this diagnosis was the Oregon Health Center in Portland. There a blood sample was taken and sent to Washington, D.C. the only site authorized to diagnose the condition. It was confirmed. Adrienne and I were deeply saddened by the news, as we had seen a future in which we grew old together. Our sadness was allayed when Dr. Alan Barker, said, “Yes, I doubt that you will live to be 90!” Relief ensued!

I continued to puzzle how at age 59 I was diagnosed with a congenital condition. My physician jokingly said that I should kick my parents. Too late, since both were deceased. Each six months I went to Portland where they maintained a registry for research purposes. My treatment was an infusion of Prolastin, a blood product which supplied me with an enzyme which my body does not produce. A physician at the  Center informed me that all healthy persons have a fluid which cleanses the lungs, then another which flushes out the cleanser. I do not have the latter, such that the cleanser, cleans and cleans and cleans abrasively destroying those tiny little air sacs which function as the connection between lungs and blood stream. The destruction begins at the lower level of the lungs, much different than the upper lungs and bronchial passages usually affected by acquired emphysema.

I have had infusions every fourteen days since 1992, first administered by home health care and later when I entered Medicare by the Wenatchee Valley Medical Center. The first few were overwhelming, accompanied by anxiety, itching, and weariness. Today, it is as though I go to the infusion room to see my friends, the nurses, and enjoy reading and napping for a little over an hour. They all know me well for I am one of their long term patients. They are gentle, kind, and friendly. The stick is slightly painful for a brief moment, after which I sit in the recliner chair listening to the pump, “tapocata, tapocata, tapocata.” The beep announces that the light yellow fluid that was earlier in the infusion bag above me is now inside me.

The astounding fact is that the billing for each infusion runs to nearly $10,000. Luckily Medicare and the supplementary insurance, Premara, pay only for the amount allowable for the treatment. I am deeply aware that I am a high cost item, or in medical lingo, “an outlier.” Medical insurance does not want very many like me around. Cost aside, I am grateful that my condition is light compared to many, who struggle for each breath they take. The responsible, hard-working, loyal boy within me, combined with the coward who was better off than his brother, feels a sense of survivor guilt when I think of those who suffer significantly more than I. I am no longer a jogger, but I walk several times a week over Skyline Drive after I use my two inhalants. . I huff and puff if I must walk up three flights of stairs, but most of the time others have little awareness of my chronic illness.

I have a new sense of interconnection, of being intertwined. It is no longer a theoretical idea for me. My medication is one of many cut from donated whole blood. I live on other people’s blood, those who have the enzyme which I lack. I am aware of my dependence. I am radically aware of my vulnerability, especially when the facility which produces the medication is shut down for cleaning or repairs. I have gone for a month and longer without treatment. I am grateful that I am part of a network of Alpha-1’s. I receive a call each month from Kathi Sivesind, also an Alpha-1, asking how I am doing. I feel deeply all of the caring which surrounds me.

I am forever grateful that there is a treatment for my condition and feel sad about all those who lived and died before this new development. There was nothing to be done. I am equally aware of those in medical research who found new answers. God, I am sure, has been luring this accomplishment.

Of all the new understandings which I have gained, the most striking was that my body receives information which is beyond the usual five senses. Elementary school children learn in science classes about the five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Of these we are most often guided by sight. Our body brings to each moment of creativity this valuable information about the world. The body is our source of our relationships with the world, our conduit. It is not in the classroom, but more likely in novels or TV programs that we hear about a “sixth sense,” usually portrayed as science fiction and spooky.

The philosopher, David Hume in the eighteenth century, stated with great conviction that humans are the blank pages upon which the stimuli from our five senses write their messages. Humans are open receivers to our senses. It seems a natural outcome, then, that later biology and psychology would focus on the stimulus-response bonds, the incoming stimuli and the responses of the organism. This and only this was the proper realm of study for true science. The rest was alchemy, astrology, phrenology and palmistry.

The idea of a center of creativity stands in radical contrast to this earlier view of reality. A moment in which persuaders gather to create something was unheard of and clearly unscientific. Even more the idea that we have experiences which are not gained from our five senses is preposterous. The new vision proposes that we have “unconscious experience!” We experience that of which we are not aware. Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century gifted us with this new insight of the unconscious through his many clinical case studies. While this idea hearkens back to the mystical sixth sense, it arises more through our interconnection with all in the universe—through God.

Our bodies are bringing us the “feel” of our vast relationships in the world. I thought of it in this way: if we are truly intertwined with all happenings in the universe, how do we experience this multitude? Surely, our five senses are not adequate to the task. There must be some other avenues. We must then feel the universe! My value and regard for my body increases as I know it to be a source of many distant and minute happenings in the universe which usually go unnoticed. It increases my need to listen to my body.

One such mystical experience stands out for me. I was serving as pastor of the Mercer Island church in 1967. My brother, Harry and his wife Niky, lived near Washington, D.C. Her health was precarious, in fact, interrupting my trip to Mississippi several years before. One night I was dreaming that my younger brother, Harold, came to our bedroom reporting that Dad was cold and the bed was wet. This dream was broken by a telephone call from Harry reporting sadly that Niky had just died. I must have already been receiving some feeling or sensing of this event in my dream state. I might have just written  this off as an aberrant experience or simply chance if it were not for the many stories in a similar vein which people have told me. I conclude that our bodies are an awesome source of our togetherness. I imagine these relationships as those committee members who are mere shadowy forms in any given committee meeting: vague and nearly hidden persuaders.

One moment of creativity in which my body really threw me for a loop was the morning I heard these words on the telephone from a urological technician. “Are you sitting down?” I said that I was. He continued, “You have prostate cancer.” These words followed both digital exams and an unpleasant biopsy of my prostate gland. They ushered in one of the most difficult periods of my life, surgery and recovery. I was comforted by the surgical team: Dr. Wallace Gibbons, my urologist, his father, Dr. Gerald Gibbons, a general surgeon, assisting, and Dr. Robert Kintner, anesthesiologist. I knew them all. When I arrived in Wenatchee, Jerry and Barbara were active members in the church and Wally was their teenage son. Bob was a long time friend who was active in the Brethren Baptist Church. I felt as if I were in the Allstate Insurance ad: “You’re in Good Hands.” It could only happen in little ‘ole River City.

The surgery was successful, as Dr. Gibbons performed the nerve-saving techniques developed by a Johns Hopkins University surgeon and researcher. I remain to this day grateful to this researcher, for those before his awesome discovery were left totally impotent and told that they should be grateful to be alive. I would not be grateful simply to be alive, rather I would sing with the baritone in Porgy and Bess, “Who calls it livin’ when no gal will give in to no man what’s one hundred years.” I was fortunate to live at a time when nerve-saving was an option.

It was late July when I was released from the hospital with my catheter held in my hand. Several days later a terrible wild fire threatened our community and we were told to prepare to evacuate. In retrospect it is a bit humorous to picture my walking around frantically, catheter in hand, deciding what we should load in the car. In those moments of creativity, I was forced to ignore my body and focus intently upon the necessary valuables and documents we could not afford to lose. Vivid in our minds was the scene several years earlier when 33 homes were totally destroyed by a fire sweeping down a nearby hillside. Luckily, the winds subsided and the fire was contained a few miles before reaching the crest of the hill above our home.

After two weeks I was able to move about with a walking catheter, granting me freedom to be in public. I relished my first lunch out at the Green House restaurant, our favorite place of dining. Later I began the rugged, curved, rocky and unmarked trail back to sexuality. There were limited avenues for regaining a sexual relationship, as some of the more recent medications, like the oft touted blue pill, were not then available. I used a vacuum tube to pump up an erection which was then held by a tight rubber band at the base of my penis. Ugh! I injected my penis with a needle, the liquid in the vial insuring an erection. Yow! Following the injection there were times when my erection would last too long and be quite painful. Oooh! Oooh! Never, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would be injecting myself, to say nothing of doing so in the most erogenous zone in my body. Ouch! Ouch!

Later, I turned to Viagra, the blue pill which had just been introduced. I experienced sporadic success and endured the frequent accompanying side effects: head and stomach aches. The more recently developed medications, “Levitra” and “Cialis,” became part of my repertoire. Each time I swallowed a pill I was plagued with the worry about whether it would work this time. I knew from my counseling practice of the syndrome, aptly called “performance anxiety.” I recall taking a list of reasons which might account for those times of sexual failure to Dr. Gibbons, asking which might be operating. He carefully looked over the list and gave me the response, “All of them.” We both laughed. I got it: physician heal thyself!

Two issues are at stake in the recovery from a prostatectomy, sexual performance and continence, both of which are lost due to the surgery. Each offered tremendous challenge as there was no immediate or quick answer to either. Adult diapers, euphemistically called Depends, were routine for many weeks, just as was “losing it.” I practiced regularly the Kegel exercises to strengthen my sphincter muscles and still would continue to pass some urine. I would rise from a chair and Oops! In these early weeks I had little influence over my body. I had to accept my condition, continue exercising, and hope for future control. It came, but even much later there would be times of little accidents.

The greatest loss for me, indeed, for both of us, is spontaneity. The time for sexual intimacy is early morning, not anytime you feel aroused. The testosterone level is highest after sleep. The embrace is determined by the time required for the medication to promote significant blood flow through dilated vessels and produce an erection, one hour, two hours or longer. I longed for earlier days, but then was caught up short when I thought of those intimate moments which were delayed to “put in the diaphragm” or by a crying child entering the bedroom.  

I have found peace and acceptance with the qualities of the sexual embrace we now share. Though different than those of earlier years, lacking some of the romantic, spontaneous feelings, it is still an intimate sharing which I long for regularly. It would be so much easier if I had little sexual interest, low libido. It would be more convenient if I simply could take it or leave it. But I do not and I cannot. I have never felt more vital, masculine, and alive that I do now in my early seventies. These feelings lead me to a vital and continuing interest in sexual intimacy.

I have shared my experiences with my body. I know that relationship with my body as both agony and ecstasy. The moments of intense nausea in the gall bladder attack and the struggle with prostate cancer contrast vividly with delight of an orgasm and the awesome peace following. It is through this body of mine that I feel events both within and the universe surrounding. I am at my best when I cherish my beloved body and facilitate the needs it presents. My center of creativity enters into a loving, respectful attitude toward those many centers of creativity which are my body.