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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter – April 25, 2010
I had never seen anyone sleep like that before, both her shoed feet planted firmly on the floor, her head on the end of the bed, but not the part of the bed that we think of as the head, that is, the end nearest the wall. Instead, the elderly woman occupying the middle portion of a three - person room laid her head on what we would call the foot of the bed. A little topsy turvy, but, as I would come to find out, it was a symbolically appropriate posture for someone whose grip on the ground is tenuous at best. “She always sleeps that way,” her roommate said, who was also in bed.
After lunch, when I visited, is nap time in the nursing home. Even if the residents are not tired, the staff puts them to bed anyway. Remember what Jesus said last week: “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” Very truly, indeed; gait belts, held by an aide and wrapped around a resident’s waist, intended only to be used as a support when someone is walking, can also be used as an involuntary guide.
The roommate, keenly interested in my appearance, continued addressing me. “She’ll wake up if you talk to her.” She was right about that. A lot of people in these facilities – nursing homes and hospitals - who seem to be sleeping are truly only resting their eyes; a word softly spoken will usually open them up. If it doesn’t, then they really are out for the count and you have to make your visit later. Sometimes, when chaplains are rushed for time or for some reason do not want to talk with someone – like the woman last week who gave me the one fingered salute when I said hello to her – we will stick our head in the room, see the eyes closed, and then go happily on our way, telling ourselves that we didn’t want to wake them up.
Looming over this oddly postured little woman, I whispered, “Hello.” The roommate was right; the eyes popped open, the head rose from the foot of the bed, and the woman looked directly at me; only instead of “hello,” the first words out of her mouth were, “I don’t know who I am or where I am.”
I answered, “Your name is Dorothy and you live at…” and then I named the facility. “Oh, yes,” she said, pause. “Who are you and what can you do for me?” Dorothy is nothing if not direct. “I’m the chaplain and I can say a prayer for you.” “Okay,” she said, so I did. When I was finished she said, “Am I Dorothy?” I said, “Your name is Dorothy and if you forget I’ll remember it for you.” It seemed to satisfy her and she lay her head down again.
While Dorothy may have difficulty recalling her name – difficulty which will only increase as her dementia does – she has no trouble at all remembering the words to the songs she sang when she was young. Later, in the second floor activity room, where all the people like Dorothy gather, she was happily singing along to “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey.” Later she would sing, just as enthusiastically, “Jesus loves me.” I’ve seen this phenomenon over and over.
Alicia Clair, a professor of music therapy at the University of Kansas, recently told the New York Times of an event which would cause everyone who works with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients to nod their heads in understanding.
It concerned Tom, a wanderer. Whenever his wife Elsie came to visit him on the unit for patients with dementia, he would give her a brief peck on the cheek and then wander through the hallways, staring out the window. Elsie tried to walk with him and hold hands but he would shake her off, leaving her devastated.
Professor Clair, looking for ways to help couples like Elsie and Tom connect, asked Elsie if she would like to try dancing with Tom. Why not? So she put on some music from the 1940s – The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Frank Sinatra singing “Night and Day.” Ms. Clair said she knew Tom was a World War Two veteran and couples from that era did a lot of ballroom dancing.
As Sinatra began singing, Elsie looked at Tom and opened her arms. Tom stared for a moment, then walked over and began leading her in a foxtrot. “They danced for thirty minutes!” Ms. Clair said. When they were finished, Elsie broke down and sobbed. “I haven’t been held by my husband in three years,” she told Ms. Clair. “Thank you for brining him back.”
Music did bring him back; at least for a while. “Researchers and clinicians are finding that when all other means of communication have shut down, people remember and respond to music…Tom had forgotten his name and couldn’t utter one word, but hearing Sinatra prompted him to dance,” said the Times reporter.
I don’t need to read a lot of clinical studies to know this; I’ve seen it again and again. Music has a way of cutting through the clutter that dementia piles up in the attics of the sufferers’ psyches, able to dig its way to seemingly lost memories. The noted neurologist Dr. Oliver Sachs has said that music can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because, he writes, “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”
But it can’t be just any music, mind you. The trick, music therapists say, is to find out what music served as the soundtrack when the patient was a teenager and a young adult. Those years are powerful times in developing personal autonomy – a time of first love, learning to drive, moving into your dorm or your first apartment. All their lives people will recall the music they heard during those years; which makes me wonder what songs those earnest, smiling therapists will play when those of my generation will be wheeled unasked into the activity room. Will we be singing and clapping along as old Beatles and Rolling Stones songs play on the Karaoke machine?
But note, it’s not only what was playing on the car radio when we were young that stays in our brains; it’s also what we heard sitting in those little chairs in the church basement and later when sitting in the pews. I’m talking about the songs of faith: the summer campfire songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the winter holiday hymns like “Silent Night,” and the psalms, especially Psalm 23, the best known and the most often quoted of all the 150 sacred songs that occupy the middle of the Bible, a Psalm that can be sung in any season.
Sing them, we do; more than any of the other books in the Bible, the Psalms invite our active participation with the words; they do not talk about God to us; they talk to God with us. Michael Morgan, organist at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, says, “Reading Psalms, we do not find ourselves as secondhand recipients of God’s Word, but as one to one communicants actively in conversation with God. We lift the Psalms to God as our prayers,” says Mr. Morgan, “as though we are speaking our own words rather than recalling an ancient litany.”
Indeed, the Psalms reflect our changing circumstances, our changing sentiments, all the while reminding us of what does not change. In songs of praise, they remind us that it is God who creates and sustains us; in songs of lament they assure us that this same God will strengthen us and love us and see us through our trials.
They’ve been doing so for centuries. In 1655, a Scottish pastor named David Dickson described the seasons of our lives as a blend of “crosses and sweet comforts,” adding that the Psalms reveal every imaginable condition of human experience, but never without the illumination of who God is and where we stand in relation to him, as the 23rd does today: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me.”
Dorothy is not, as we say, oriented times three – that is, she does not know who she is, where she is, or what day it is – nonetheless knows these words, as Tom knew how to dance to Sinatra. Because of this memory, somewhere she knows that God is oriented to her.
The wonderful Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann likes to group the psalms around three themes – orientation, disorientation and new orientation. God knows that we know what each of these seasons feel like; so do the psalms.
When it all makes sense; when everything is in its place; God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, we experience the season of orientation, singing of the joy in creation and the wonderful blessings of life. Psalm 100 comes to mind: “May a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord is God…we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?
But when the seasons change, so do the songs; we roam the halls, disoriented, alienated, alone, abandoned by all, even the one we feel we can always turn to. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me…O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.” Night and day, it seems, no one is there. And yet Psalm 22 ends, “I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.”
And then, God hears us again; we sing of redemption, rebirth, resurrection; a new orientation. Psalm 30: “O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me…sing praises to the Lord…and give thanks to his holy name.”
That holy name, my friends, is what remains, through all the seasons, through all the songs; night and day, day and night; through the dark valley and by the still waters, the holy name remains and knows who we are even if our names are lost on our lips they are never gone from God’s mind. God will pray the psalms even when we cannot.
A man named Richard Dewaard has written what he calls the “Alzheimer’s version of Psalm 139; it begins like this: “Listen, Dad, God sees you, he knows what’s happened, he knows you…he knows your tangled thoughts; he knows them straight; he knows when you’re not here and where you are when you’re gone…Before your words are lost, before they get to your tongue, he knows what you were about to say, what you meant. He knows you.”
And it ends like this: “God thinks of you, Dad, often…The many ways God cares for you, if we tried to count them, would outnumber sand on a beach. So you can rest easy while I count. I’m counting Mom’s tears. I’m counting the slights, the indignities, the affronts to your good pride. I’m counting the frayed edges, the missing pieces of your lost person. But we’ll get through this, Dad, because when you awake – everyday and someday – you will be with him. And someday I too will awake with him, with you.” The next time I wake up Dorothy, I’ll tell her that.