A Letter to my Pastor Heart to Heart

 

 

 

     My friend and Pastor asked me, about writing a religious piece on my experience on open-heart surgery. A challenge for me, since when I do write about religion, I write in the First Person about hypocrites, especially during the holiday and the political seasons. I am of a liberal mind, so I am usually taken as a big sinner, un-American, or Satan spawn by many people. My usual method of writing spiritual things has been in the Third Person, as in fictitious settings. My way of experimenting on things. Thinking things through, as it were, as my wife would say, my big chance to get Excommunicated from the church.

 

     So, a few weeks after my surgery date, I wondered if others were expecting that I would receive a grand revelation or to my conservative acquaintances, my comeuppance. We’ll see. Thursday morning, the nurses took me away from my worried wife, and I woke the next day. One doctor’s voice told me that they had placed a rather large valve replacement. In my groggy state, trying to rationalize how my doctor could get extra large in a heart valve and I can't get size fifteen shoes, when I heard my Pastor spoke. 

 

     In my vague recollection, I heard him say hello and say a prayer.  Oh well, so much about talking with God. Not that I would have much to ask. If I had planned this event more carefully, maybe. My past encounters with famous and important people have been to just keep my distance from them, thinking that they were more fable than fact about them. Although, I believe God would give you an audience, my guess is that "the Almighty" would already know what we need. I would rather have spoken with my younger brother who died a year earlier. A songwriter and playwright in his own right. None of his works will see the light of day in Wisconsin. But, they have in Illinois.

 

     In my fictional piece, I am writing, my young heroine who at first doesn’t believe in God, during a series of events, becomes pissed off and later gets screaming mad at God. To love someone, even a God, may also come with all its accidental perks. She comes to Earth by way of tragedy and by accident to live among us. She soon becomes the savior of sorts of our world and hers, and she doesn't know it yet. She is kind of like us, and maybe we don’t know it yet. Her negative views on weapons, and pacifistic message may not be everyone cup of tea.

 

     A couple of days later, I’m still in the hospital. The nurses had me walk around the corridor around the nurse’s station. In training for a marathon, I suppose. Me on a walker carrying bags of… connected to…well, let’s not go there. I tried out a comfy chair across from the nurse’s station watching the various people go by and eavesdropping. Most of what I heard was about patients’ conditions, when one of the nurses started talking about her brother that recently got back from Iraq. The gist of the conversation was about his inability to adjust to civilian life. It seems that the military can train our soldiers to “lock and load,” but is clueless about unloading our people and or setting them free.

 

     Thinking on how I could help in response to this nurse’s problem, I remembered my logistics conundrum of getting up, with all this exterior plumbing with hospital issued breezy attire. That was when Pastor came again for a visit. He was happy to see me up and around. It was good to see a familiar face and not someone to wanting to get a sample of me. After a pleasant visit and a blooming plant, I was alone. I thought again of inquiring that one nurse, but maybe I wasn’t especially courageous, thinking that some would believe that the soldier’s problem wasn’t because of his experience with the war. A while back there was a game played during Couples' Night, someone posed a question for the wives to answer. What phobia does your husband fear most? My wife, of seventeen years of marriage at the time, said I had none. I never had thought of that before.

 

     When I was first told that this operation had to take place more than a year ago, the last time I spent an over-night stay in a hospital was over forty years ago. For eight years, I attended the Chicago Public elementary schools in which I had to endure years and years at getting beat-up. It all cane to a head after school in November. A group of seventh and eighth grader boys beat the crap out of me and left me for dead in a Chicago alley.

 

     Soon after that, my folks transferred my brother and me to a Christian School, Lutheran. If you thought Christian schools turns out saintly students, you've been sadly led astray. After high school and not being a spoiled student, I rode my bicycle to college, and my next brush with death. Actually twice. Between a two ton auto and a bicycle, the bicyclist always loses. During my college years, I waited nervously and acted against as two students plotted the end of us all. Close call again.

 

     Five peaceful years later and on my way to my wedding, I was stopped behind another car, I am driving now. I was at a railroad crossing. The car ahead of me started smoking under the hood. The driver jumped out and opened the hood releasing the smoke into fire. I in turn jumped out my car wearing my tuxedo and retrieved a fire extinguisher from my trunk. I put out the helpless motorist's auto fire, and went on my way to my wedding.

 

     During the first five years of marriage five people of our twenty-five members wedding party died. Most were elderly; one was not, my mother-in-law. She had bouts with cancer over the years. She was Irish and had a strong Catholic faith. All her life she was told to fear and to obey what the Church says. She died afraid. It has taken me years to finally figure it out. If your faith requires you to be afraid, dump it.

 

On cemetery markers everywhere, they list the date of your birth and death, but not that you've lived. Like all essays on death and the life after, this one is incomplete. I recently saw a movie that had the right idea. Like all plays, movies, books, and songs with this like message could well be banned from within the borders of Wisconsin or other states of mind.

 

There's only now

There's only here

Give in to love

Or forever live in fear.