Excerpt from Mental Fight by Ben Okri
For, after the gospels,
After the human and divine comedies,
After the one thousand and one nights,
After crime and punishment,
War and peace, pride and prejudice,
The sound and the fury,
Between good and evil,
Being and nothingness,
After the tempest, the trial,
And the wasteland,
After things have fallen apart,
After the hundred years of solitude,
And the remembrance of things past,
In the kingdom of this world,
We can still astonish the gods in humanity
And be the stuff of future legends,
If we but dare to be real,
And have the courage to see
That this is the time to dream
The best dream of them all.
The indigenous peoples of Australia sing and dance the stories of the Dreamtime when the world was created. With astonishment and wonder, human beings live into these stories of spirit beings such as the great Rainbow Serpent. If the poet Ben Okri is right, we live in the new dreamtime of creation. Now, however, we are the authors of the stories and it is the beings of the spiritual worlds who watch and listen with anticipation. What will the human being do now?
A good story opens moments of possibility where the story could go this way or that or yet another. We are suspended in a space of potential until the moment of decision when the way is decided and the story unfolds until the next moment of decision. These moments could also be called crises. The Chinese word for crises means opportunity and danger. How do we choose?
Sophie Delezio’s story has touched many hearts and she has become a symbol of hope for many people. When she was two and a half years old, a car crashed into the childcare centre where Sophie was sleeping and she suffered horrific burns leading to the loss of both her feet and one hand. Then two and a half years later, she was hit by another car on a pedestrian crossing. She survived both accidents to become a strong-willed, happy child in what can be called a miracle or even two. Her face was untouched by the fire and her shining eyes radiate her spirit. Reading the accounts given by her family, friends, doctors, nurses and emergency workers, it becomes clear that this was indeed a miracle but of human proportions, one worthy of astonishing the Gods!
Every time the word miracle appears in Sophie’s story it is laid at the feet of dedicated and inspired human beings making decisions and acting on them. One nurse describes an orchestral enterprise composed of the efforts of many people in concert with the intensive care specialist as conductor. “We sat down as a team and we made the decision to do something out of the ordinary for this child’ says Dr. Maitz. As her mother puts it they decided to “look outside the square”. It was an impossible call. Would her life be worth living with these injuries, would the pain be unbearable? Would she thank them when she was twenty one or curse them? There was no ethical manual for this one – or perhaps too many manuals! The medical team based their decision on the strength of the family and friendship support they could see around Sophie. More human beings!
As Dr. Jacobe tells it, this was not a miracle in the sense of divine intervention. In fact most of the accounts agree on this. There is no “Deus ex Machina”-the “god from the machine” that was wheeled on at the end of the Greek drama, to sort everything out—operating here. There was plenty of prayer but so often they did not know what to pray for, what would be best for Sophie. So they prayed for courage, faith, inspiration, those qualities of soul where the divine and human meet. This may not sound so remarkable but these qualities are not always available to us. One witness to the accident scenes describes her experience: “I always thought if I was ever in a position to help I would put my life on the line but…” In the moments that make the difference, some could not find their place, could not respond. Their ability to choose was frozen. Not everyone was needed to rush into the burning building. Descriptions of the emergency and the journey of recovery make it clear that different people were needed for different actions, some deceptively simple yet essential like bringing meals to the hospital. Hearing the call and having the courage to act amid the uncertainty and pain are precious faculties which are worth praying for.
The struggle to find the relationship to God that would carry them through
this was potent. As one surgeon asks: Why a miracle for this child from God
and not the others on the ward? Jan Donohoo, one of the chaplains, entertains
the idea that there might be a lesson in this but concludes that she does not
believe in the kind of God that would do this to Sophie so that she could teach
us a lesson. “I have some questions for God about it all” she says,
‘but I don’t think I’m going to get any real answers this
side of eternity:” so she prays that they will be able to call to and
draw on God. To stay connected an African saying steadies her:
God is good all the time.
All the time God is good.
Sophie’s story is written by many people. They were all in crisis, deciding and acting in situations where the rules and protocols and manuals are impotent. They all had to make a call with incomplete knowledge and values that pulled in different directions. They were all “out there where the buses don’t run” as a client of David Epston once put it. It is out of experience in these situations that a form of ethical practice known as narrative ethics has emerged. While not totally rejecting the consideration of ethical principles and rules, this approach acknowledges that every moral situation is unique and unrepeatable and cannot be fully captured by appealing to universal principles. The real life stories of the people concerned are valued and placed in the centre. The team that decided to “look outside the square” for Sophie did this on the basis of her real parents and not theoretical ones.
This approach echoes that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor hanged in the last days of the Second World War for his part in a failed assassination plot against Hitler. For him there “is no universal ethics” and “every situation is unique”. He called on us to live as if everything depended on us, “as if there were no God”. What he meant is not that there is no God but that God is not there to save us and fill in the gaps in our lives—to be wheeled on in a machine. He saw God as demanding responsibility and promising forgiveness and consolation for the mistakes made in the courageous ethical adventure of life and the ever present relationship with Christ as the source for free ethical decisions, for the new creation. The gaps in the story are for us.
The renowned ethicist Margaret Somerville writes that we need a language of moral imagination and moral intuition that gives us access to the ways of knowing we need for ethical decision making in keeping with our humanity. She sees this language as poetry. In the poetry of the stories of our lives lies a deeper wisdom that can guide us in the decisions and choices that shape our stories and the stories of those around us. It is not for no reason that so many prayers are poetic. Poetic language can take us into the realm of our soul where this divine wisdom can speak; where we find the courage to act “outside the square” and let the spirit flow through us into the gaps in our stories. The Soweto poet Oswald Mtshali describes how it is when we don’t do this.
Walls by Oswald Mtshali
Man is
A great wall builder
The Berlin Wall
The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem
But the wall
Most impregnable
Has a moat
Flowing with fright
Around his heartA wall without windows
For the spirit to breeze throughA wall
Without a door
For love to walk inThe choice to open the window for the spirit and the door for love to walk in is ours.
One of the most precious parts of my work as a priest is to be present at the end of life when the final stories are told. There is not a person who has not astonished me. Often it is the most surprising corners of their life and in the seemingly ordinary that the exceptionality unveils itself. What follows is part of a eulogy by an adult daughter for her mother, a highly qualified doctor who had to work for years in a corner store before being able to work again as a doctor in her new country. Behind the counter her smile radiated the same optimism and dedication she later showed in her work with refugees.
I’ve always thought of my mother not as a person but more like a place, she radiated this oasis of calm, and tranquillity and love and warmth and to be in her presence you just breathed in that warmth, that calm where anything could be healed with a kiss. Any disaster could be solved with a smile and any sadness could be banished with a laugh. And I’ve realised that her spirit will live on because every person sho was ever in her presence took away with them a little bit of compassion, and happiness and warmth and will share that with every other person that they meet.
References:
Sally Collings, Sophie’s Journey (Sydney 2007)
Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination (Melbourne 2006)
Lisa Devine is a priest of The Christian Community in Melbourne, Australia