A memorial service “miracle”

“Divine Order and a Miracle Memorial Service”

In 2015, I officiated a memorial service at the Unity Spiritual Center where I worked. It was a small, quiet, intimate service.

I want to tell you how that memorial service came to be.

On Mother’s Day I was at a Cafe with my family. It was packed. My kids were not happy. All in all, it was stressful and not very fun and things were not going well. It was not the experience I wanted Marta, my wife, to have. But we got through it. And it turned out just fine. Marta knows she is loved by me and the kids. That weekend I was on call at Penrose hospital, where I was doing a one year Chaplain Residency. I was on the pager. And sure enough, just as things were settling down in our brunch, I got paged to the Emergency Department.

An aneurism or something like that, very serious. 57 year old man. (A few of the details are changed here to protect the identify of this patient).

I left to go to the hospital. I sat with this patient’s wife. She was trying to keep it together, trying to be brave. But I could tell she was overwhelmed.

After just a few minutes, as I was sitting in the Emergency Room, I was paged again. This time the emergency was a self-inflicted gun shot wound, a lot of family. This second case took up a lot of my time and energy. But everyone once in a while, I’d check in on that 57 year old man and his wife. Late in the day, the doctor had a difficult conversation with the woman. I sat with her after that, to help her process what she heard. I left for the day. I had Monday off, and on Tuesday, when I worked again, I checked in on her at Critical Care. I met her daughter, her son. Said a quick hello, got an update. And that was it. The 57 year old man and his family were transferred to another floor. I expected never to see them again. I learned later that they were transferred to hospice. Once someone is off the floor I’m assigned that is pretty much the end of my engagement with them.

Six days later, Unity got a call from a woman seeking a place to hold a funeral for her husband. She said she had no church in our city but that Unity seemed like a good fit and would it be possible to hold the memorial at Unity. As the Associate Minister at Unity, I received an email saying: Roger, can you follow up with this? I called right away. I didn’t recognize the name when I called. But after about three minutes of our phone call, this woman said: Do you happen to work at Penrose? I do. She said: You were with me on Sunday as my husband came in with his medical condition! She said; I had told my daughter that I would love to talk to that Penrose chaplain but I thought I’d not figure out how to find you.

I never really mention my work at Unity to patients at Penrose and hadn’t with her.

I am in awe that of all the churches in this town — even of all the progressive churches in this town — that she called the one that I happen to work at. I am in amazement that we were reunited.

At the hospital, she had told me that her prayer was that she might be guided and that she might not feel alone as she had to make decisions, that she might feel God’s presence with her, because the idea of doing all of this alone was too overwhelming to consider. She needed guidance and wisdom.

As we sat to plan the funeral, I told her that the fact that we were reunited might be a metaphor for the idea that she will not have to ever really think of herself as alone. As I sat with her, her daughter was there, tears in her eyes, her son was there, tears in his eyes. They both live far away, but they are with her. She was not alone, they were helping her with important decisions.

I told some chaplains at the hospital this story, and they said: God works in mysterious ways. This is Holy Spirit stuff! I told some friends who are maybe a little more rational and they said, Wow. That is a cool coincidence.

I don’t know, frankly, what to think.

I am just going to go with the idea that life reminds us of our interconnectedness in a lot of funky, creative, interesting ways.

I am just going to go with the idea that it is neither coincidence nor Holy Spirit stuff, but both. I am going to not try to solve the puzzle. I am going to look at it in a non-dual way. I am going to stay in my heart and keep out of my head.

I’ll just go with: I promise to keep myself open and I will be in touch with the way that the sacred can be accessed. I say stay open to surprise, for surprise is God’s other name. Stay open to love and grace and joy.

After I told this story in a sermon at Unity, a man who has been at Unity a long long time, rushed up to me and said: We call that Divine Order.

I looked it up. Maybe this is exactly what happened: There is One Presence and One Power moving in and through us — in divine and perfect order.