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On Making Lemonade Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 12, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 17:1-7 Philippians 4:4-14
I begin this morning with the story of a remarkable woman. Her name was Martha Mason. She was born on May 31, 1937 in Lattimore North Carolina and died on May 6th of this year after spending all but eleven of her years in an iron lung. “From her horizontal world” noted the writer of her obituary, “a 7-foot-long 880-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head—Ms. Mason lived a life that was by her own account fine and full, reading voraciously, graduating with highest honors from high school and college, entertaining, and eventually writing” a little known memoir entitled Breath, which Diane Murphy miraculously tracked down for me this week! Apparently Mason could have chosen a different life outside the cylinder, a life hooked up to breathing tubes and taken with frequent trips to the hospital for infections. Instead she chose the freedom the iron lung afforded her. “It took no professional training to operate,” she said, and let her “remain mistress of her own house with just two aides assisting her. ‘I’m happy with who I am,’ Ms Mason told the Charlotte Observer in 2003. ‘I wouldn’t have chosen this life certainly, but given this life I’ve probably had the best situation anyone could ask for.’” To the imagination of most temporarily-abled people (we forget, do we not, that our mobility, our sight, our hearing and even our breath can be lost in an instant) such a life could not possibly lead to anything other than despair, complaint, depression and endless days mired in meaninglessness. For Martha Mason it did not and I found myself wondering why. How it is that some manage to triumph in the face of great adversity while others succumb to the darkness? This very question haunted psychiatrist Victor Frankl during and following his experience as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps. In the last chapter of the now classic Man’s Search for Meaning, a book whose German title literally translated was “saying yes to life in spite of everything”, Frankl makes a case for what he calls “tragic optimism” and for what Paul called the “hope against hope” of those who trust in God’s promises. Frankl begins by acknowledging the pain, guilt and death that dog human existence, what he tags the tragic triad. “How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that?” he asks. “How…can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects?” The question presupposes a capacity within each of us that can creatively pull meaning out of life’s tragedies. But the capacity for meaning is not a natural capacity. Rather and according to Frankl it is an acquired, even a practiced one. Those who have endured tragedy know this best. Meaning blithely attributed to tragedy by an onlooker is almost always banal. Meaning that allows the human mind and heart to endure can only be wrung out of the chaos that encroaches on the edges of mortal existence. The happiness of a Martha Mason therefore strikes us as exceptional because we doubt ourselves capable of her indomitable insistence on life’s goodness and meaning were we faced with the same set of limits. To wit: there were those in the camps, Frankl reports, unable to muster the intestinal fortitude that the search for meaning amid tragedy required. Inmates called it “give-up-itis” and marked its onset with the refusal to get up out of the straw wet with human excrement. “Nothing—neither warnings nor threats—could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.” Once liberated, Frankl began to think concretely about what distinguished those for whom the search for meaning had not subsided and eventually identified “three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life amid the tragic triad of pain, guilt and death. The first” he says “is by creating a work or doing a deed” (an avenue Presbyterians surely must laud on the day after the day after John Calvin’s 500th birthday). Put in the language of our own Reformed tradition, life’s meaning is to be found in one’s vocation, vocare in Latin, one’s calling. The belief that we were given the gift of life for a purpose is a defining mark of Calvin’s theological legacy, even and especially when the purpose that gives meaning to our lives does not coincide with the work a society pays us to do. Once back in Lattimore after college, Mason began writing for the local paper, dictating articles to her mother until her father’s heart attack left no time in her mother’s life for dictation. For decades, she wrote in her head. But she did so much more! She often gave dinner parties (in a prone position) with her guests around the table and her iron lung acting as her seat at the table. “She savored lively conversation, good gossip and the occasional bawdy story. Amid the rhythmic whoosh…whoosh of the iron lung, the local book club met in her home.” Martha Mason chose to live in an iron lung because it freed her to spend herself on the life of the mind and on the lives of her family and friends rather than the ills of the body. Even when she could not dictate her sentences to her mother, she formed them in her mind, spoke them at the dinner table and honed them in the give and take of a book group. Then, in the mid-1990s, when she acquired a voice-activated computer, the light of her life’s work began to illumine the purpose hidden in years of silent preparation. Likewise when Frankl was taken to Auschwitz, “a manuscript ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly,” he reports, “my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.” How many times in this sanctuary have we thanked God for the meaning that lies hidden in the heart of sorrow and disappointment and grief as we remember before God a friend whose days have come to an end? So in the first place, meaning is found in creating a work or doing a deed. In the second place, according to Frankl, meaning can be found not only in deeds but also in love…not only in giving one’s self to a task or a duty but also in giving one’s self to the other. If we set sentiment aside, we again see meaning wrung out of a relationship onlookers judge to be tragic. Mason’s own mother comes to mind in a story told by Frankl of a woman whose eleven year old son had died (as Mason’s brother had died of polio on the eve of her own diagnosis), leaving the mother to care for her remaining son who was crippled with polio. A suicide attempt found her under Frankl’s care. Helping her to wring meaning out of a tragic life, he asked her to imagine herself on her death bed looking back over her life. Searching for meaning in a life now taken with the care of her surviving son, she said through her tears, “I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life was full of meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it; I have done my best—I have done the best for my son. My life was not failure!” Ten years before Martha Mason acquired the computer that enabled her to write, her mother had a series of strokes and soon “descended into dementia and abusiveness, occasionally slapping and cursing her daughter. Mason insisted that her mother remain at home. From her iron lung, she took over the running of the household, planning meals, paying bills and arranging for her mother’s care.” In Breath she records how her life acquired meaning as she lived for the sake of her mother who had lived for the sake of her daughter and her husband. Life’s meaning awaits us in the life we give away that is, in the shadow of the cross, the love for which we were made. Finally Frankl writes of “the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, and by so doing change himself.” Martha Mason said she survived because of her endless curiosity and her belief that there was always so much more to learn. Put in the shorthand that has been my mantra since reading Frankl’s book as a freshman in college: I am always free to choose my attitude toward anything that befalls me in life. The choice of joy often comes only in the morning after a prolonged dark night of the soul. Nevertheless, the choice is always before us. Frankl sites the life of a young man who, at age 17, woke up as a quadriplegic after a diving accident. In a letter to Frankl a few years after the accident the young man wrote, “I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn’t break me. I am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.” The day is ours, Frankl would say, a gift to fill with meaning. Wring meaning out of the hours that run too swiftly toward death with deeds worthy of the gift, with the love that knows our life has been given us for another and with the hope against hope which allows us to see light shining in the darkness and be changed. But Paul would say more. “…I have learned to be content with whatever I have,” he wrote to the Philippians. Paul’s attitude along with the whole of this sermon might be dismissed as the cockeyed optimism of one who has never really suffered until we remember Paul’s words reminding the Corinthians that for Christ’s sake he had been “afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed…enduring… afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger….We are treated as… sorrowful,” he concludes, “yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” You could say that Paul found meaning in his calling and in the life he gave away and in his choice to transcend any given hardship through hoping against hope in God’s promises. But at the end of our text for the morning, Paul tells us more: tells us his secret for living amid hardship with joy. It is a secret that has been repeated by many in the eye of the storm without or within: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” The sentence implies a life lived, at every turn, in relation to the living God whom Paul had met first when he was struck down and blinded on the road to Damascus. “This moment is all I know,” wrote Martha Mason with her breath, “all that I can claim as mine. I must meet God, and God meets me, where I am. I live in a state of readiness for the next adventure. If heaven or hell should be a continuation of what I make of life here, I want to be open to the joy of undiluted love, peace, and knowledge.” May the same God meet you where you are and find you open, no matter the darkness ahead, to the joy of a life whose search for meaning has led us together to the foot of the cross. Thanks be to God. |