An Organic Openness
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by Tracy Andres
While working in a hospice, I was beginning a morning shift by checking in on a European-American female in her sixties, who was dying from cancer. After talking about her condition, she initiated a conversation about God and heaven. I asked her whether she was curious what heaven would be like, and she shared with me that she wasn't certain about heaven or whether she wanted to meet God at this time. I asked her why. She answered that she wasn't sure God would want to see her. She hadn't been very close to God, especially for the past year and a half while suffering from cancer.My response was that God is always close to us, no matter whether we formally pray or not. I then asked her whether praying with her right now would be helpful for her, and she said that she would like that. I prayed aloud while holding one of her hands in both of mine. While I was doing this, I felt a great stream of energy flowing out of my hands. I then began to pray to God to help me remain present to the moment without panic and to help me discern when I could safely disconnect.
We prayed together for about ten minutes, then one of her daughters came into the room to visit her mother. I told the daughter that her mother and I had been praying together and asked her if she would like to take over for me while I went on doing hospice work. Her daughter was surprisingly grateful to do this, and I was relieved that I could detach myself from the situation.
After about twenty minutes, the daughter came out, crying, to the front room. She told me that she and her family had been trying to get their mother to pray with one of them during her disease but she had refused to do so. And the daughter was overwhelmed with emotion that she had the opportunity to pray with her mother before she died. Of course, I was overjoyed for both mother and daughter. The mother felt she had enough of a connection to God so that she could start talking to God about her suffering, pain and fear; the daughter could help her mother in a significant way. However, I was surprised that from that time on, the daughter seemed to assign the impromptu prayer session as a miracle I had somehow created. Though I tried to explain that it was very much a "thing of the Spirit," that it was merely a matter that her mother was ready to be open to God and the Spirit was helping her do it, the daughter was never convinced of this. I never mentioned the experience again with her mother; the mother herself never mentioned it to me.
After her mother died, the daughter still believed that I was just trying to be modest, while I still insisted that what I had done was just a part of my job. But, on reflection, I have wondered why a fear arose inside me about what had happened. I was indeed frightened of the presence of a power over which I had no control. I also asked myself why I had been reluctant to own fully my participation in what had happened. Why did I want to put it all on God and not acknowledge that I had been a very active vehicle?
This question is important to me because my whole spiritual, cultural and experiential life has been a lesson on the dangers of personal and institutional dulling of the awareness of the interdependence of life. I am a creation of a higher power, God, who through expending energy produced existence and through the same energy, shared and manifested as love, sustains that same existence. I am also a creation in the image of God with (among other abilities) the facility to contain, expend and share that same type of power. While I cannot control others' awareness and actions, what would happen if, in my fear, I would never take the chance to be open to and to act upon what I have? This raises the challenge for me as I continue to live out a life called to be prepared to be present to people as they explore meaningful spiritual questions and experiences in their lives.
Where I need to develop more, however, is in cultivating what I call organic openness. It is this way of being that creates space, not as if an outside force were opening a finite window but rather it would be like water, an element that of its own nature swells and contracts to the shape of the moment. Definitely God is this capability. Human beings, as images of God, have this potential engraved in their essences.
Contemplative prayer and meditation are crucial, ongoing practical disciplines in assessing this potential. I was encouraged that what contemplative practice I have engaged in paid off when I did find myself opening up to Divine Mystery at my point of fearfulness. Nevertheless, I believe that my capabilities are still underdeveloped. If I had been more at rest in the openness, I might not have hooked onto my fear of that energy connection or the fear might not have arisen at all.
Tracy, an Episcopalian working at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, is a participant in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program. This article is taken from one of her program papers; details have been changed to protect confidentiality.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.