Words, Spoken and Unspoken
By Mimi Coleman
This is the third of seven pieces meant to introduce our readers to participants in our ordination preparation course at The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These students now stand before the last threshold in the priest-training, with ordinations planned for May of 2021. Each one will contemplate a work – or works – of art that speak to their path and Christ’s working in the world in some way. We havce heard from Victoria Capon and Jeana Lee. Today we introduce you to Mimi Coleman.
Poetry has been a lifelong companion, sometimes other people’s poems, sometimes my own, as a way to voice something that is blooming inside my soul: Words, The Good Word, The Logos. I search for the right word, sometimes I find it. The search is valuable, the finding is a little creative “aha” moment when thought and word come together. I am grateful for being able to work in words, whether on the page or in my own mind and heart, or finding the right word for a patient.
Guest author, preparation student, Mimi Coleman
I am currently studying and working in a chaplaincy training, while I wait for our semester to start. This interlude in the seminary training has been a precious interruption that has allowed me to meet people at the threshold of life and death, the threshold of life-changing, life-altering circumstances that they find themselves in, either in the hospital or in the rehabilitation center. It has especially brought me in touch with deep feelings, deep resources of strength and spiritual confidence while standing in a place of calm, focus, and presence with my patients.
One of the memories of my own early life that brought me toward this chaplain work was when, at the age of 14, I worked in a hospital and got to know a child who was 2 years old, but tiny for her age. She had spent much time in the hospital, and her language was simple. Sometimes there were no words between us. When one week I came to work and found out she had died I was bereft, and I never had a chance to talk to anyone about it. It was an early and unresolved sadness that lingered with me. Late this summer, before the start of the semester, I wrote a love letter to that child:
Thoughts for a Child
I knew you long ago--I was a child myself, 14 years old, and you, a tiny one, a little charm, just barely beyond your own birth. I learned to see you, to know you, and to love you. In our way, we were together; just being together was all that we could do. Just being.
And one day you were gone. The “being together” came to an end--except in my thoughts of you, eternally two.
All these years later I reach out to you, wise now in years, flown beyond two, to the stars, beyond life, beyond death and time to Elsewhere from where (I imagine) you keep a watch. Watch over me now, little one. Help me in my being, in my growing. Help me become, and be new-born, too.
As I have gotten to know my patients in the hospital or rehab center, I watch them going through a new diagnosis, a new way of life. It is not easy; it is not always pretty. Sometimes it is just tender and new. Sometimes I have found that I feel sad for long periods of time, tears come easily and I welcome them, not always, but in phases. It started quite suddenly with one patient whom I visited without reading first about her condition and diagnosis. I appeared in the room—after having the nurse ask her if she would like a visit for spiritual care—and discovered her crying silently. I then came to understand she had lost her speech. We stood silently, both of us gazing at one another and crying silent tears, which was all we had. Just being together. This tender vulnerability and tearful expression helped me find what unites us: the core of our humanity, so precious.
She was not religious, so there was no need for prayer, but I was able to express “hopefulness” for her. The hopefulness became my “prayer” for her and with her, as we talked about things she was hopeful about. Later that day, I remembered Emily Dickinson’s poem:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
I brought a copy of this poem to my patient the following week. As the weeks passed, she gained back her speech and we have been able to have brief dialogues, helpful and reassuring, and we were even able to do a little creative writing on the last visit! Something was born in her that she knew nothing about: the word!
In my devotional bible study, I came across this passage, which at first was a conundrum, but then has become like a mantra:
Acts 14:22 There they strengthened the souls of the disciples and encouraged them to continue in the faith, saying, “It is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God.”
In the past, I would try to avoid difficulties, persecutions (tribulations as it is also translated), but now I can embrace them. Not that I wish to court disaster or challenges, or bring them on, but I feel I have gained some fortitude to withstand the blasts of fate that may come toward me, and I can look back with equanimity at past difficulties with new eyes. Now I find this passage coming to mind at times during the week when seeing patients. When they are holding on by a thread, I can stand with them, hold on with them, encourage them–in silence or with a word. I can find the golden light of love shining on that thread.
Recently I received, along with a letter, this poem, from a friend who has faced, and valiantly lived with, a long-term and deeply debilitating painful cancer diagnosis. It is a cross that she has carried as long as I have known her, maybe 18 years. Shakespeare’s words have been so helpful for me in facing her impending death, her change of life, which we never know when it will happen:
Shakespeare Sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
There are some potent images here: “the glowing of such fire” is something I feel in my friend, in her letters and strivings. And “which makes thy love more strong.” I feel my friend’s own strength, and also death’s strength as he tries to come for her but she is still holding on, occupied with her life, with love of family and friends, with her strivings, her imagination, her artistic activity, her daily enjoyments of the seasons, in spite of extreme disability. And my strong love for her, a friend’s heart connection that goes over years, and over miles (she has lived in another state for many years) and I sometimes think, over lifetimes. Where did this friendship really come from? Where is it going? This autumnal contemplation helps me think about it in terms of lifetimes. Just being together on this planet now, or somewhere else at other times.
This new-found poem also helps me with some of my new acquaintances in the hospital as they approach the threshold between life and death. Sometimes they seem to linger like the “yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang” there between the worlds.
I am grateful to have been asked to offer something for this Arts Wednesday program. It gives a place to gather all these poems and letters, blessed words, and to dip into a wellspring of thoughts and feelings that have been accompanying me in this “semester between semesters.” Sometimes, in that well-spring, I find words that can be shared; sometimes all I have to share are wordless Words of love.
Mimi Coleman has lived in North and South America as well as England. She has been a member of The Christian Community for 25 years. She worked as a Waldorf Teacher and then as an Art Therapist in a Camphill Community before taking up the seminary training. With this later-in-life change, she wants people to know, “It is never too late to take up a whole new career! ”
This is the ‘Arts Wednesday Blog’ of the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. To learn more about what we are doing at the Seminary of The Christian Community, visit our Patreon site for more content: The Light in Every Thing.
