Chaplain's Corner

A few months ago I received an email from my High School Alumni association. One of the announcements was the death of another of our classmates. That prompted me to go to the “In Memorial” section of the website and look at the pictures of the 96 members of my graduating class that have died. My graduating class had nearly 1000 members, 10 percent of us didn’t make it to our 65th birthday. As I looked over the pictures, I remembered many of those people. Some were popular, good looking, athletic and smart. Others were almost invisible, the kind of kids that come and go almost unnoticed. If they had “outstanding” abilities, they were not evident to their peers. I was one of those. I was not at all athletic, I was of average intelligence, I certainly was not popular: in fact I would think that many of my classmates who look back over the yearbook pictures may not even recognize me. I had just a small handful of friends, people from the neighbor where I lived, a couple of friends from church and that was about it.

That all seems like a far away, distant, almost unreal part of my life. The fall after graduating I went off to college in Phoenix, the next summer my parents had moved to the outskirts of Pittsburg so that summer upon coming home there was no one and nothing that was familiar. Those three years in High School, with all those people and experiences were part of my past – soon relegated to a mental box in the back corner of the attic of my mind. My father lived a philosophy of “no looking back”. We had moved often in my growing up years and when we left a community, we didn’t look back, we didn’t go back to visit old friends, we didn’t maintain connections, we just pointed our noses to the future and pressed forward. I never did like that “no looking back” philosophy of my dad’s, it left me feeling as if I never really belonged anywhere, a feeling I still struggle with to this day even though I have remained rooted in Winnipeg since 1981.

So what does any of this have to do with spiritual care? Well, this reality is central to spiritual care for one of the aspects of our spirituality has to do with our “rootedness” in the lives of others, how well connected we are to others, how deep and sustaining those connection have been. Years ago I watched a show about Aspen trees in the Rockies. Scientists had discovered that one particular Aspen grove was the largest living organism in the world. The entire grove of aspens were all organically interconnected through the root system, they were all one although manifesting as a forest of individual trees.

In that same forest grow a number of different kinds of evergreen trees. This makes a beautiful sight in the fall when the aspens turn yellow and the evergreens with the dark green boughs stand tall amid the sea of yellow leaves. The difference is more than meets the eye. Those evergreens are single, individual trees, separate and distinct from the others interspersed in the sea of yellow aspens. Unlike the aspens, there is no connection. For most of my life I have felt like an evergreen in an aspen forest. Present, but not connected, recognized but not really a part.

However, on a spiritual level I am more like a “member” of that Colorado aspen grove. As a “child of God” I am spiritually connected to all God’s children. In God’s family there are no “evergreens”. We are all connected drawing our life from God himself. But this connection at times feels broken, we consider ourselves separate, we shun that deep spiritual connection with others. I wonder why that is?