478 - Invitation to a Simple Feast

Invitation to a Simple Feast
By Diane M. Komp

May our lives be a feast: the spirit of Jesus in our midst, the work of Jesus in our hands, the spirit of Jesus in our work
J. Metternich Team¹

ACH of us has a personal parable for an idealized feast. Jesus compared a royal wedding banquet to the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 22:2). Recently, I heard a man in a medium-grade diner warn his son in rapid-fire Spanish that if the kid didn't stop whining and eat his bagel, he wouldn't get to McDonald's for lunch. El padre knew his son's festive requirements.

The banquet I long for most has nothing to do with cholesterolburdened beef and fries. For the past twenty-flve years, I have had the privilege of working with children with cancer and of sharing in their lives. When you witness many soul-fortifying lives, your standards for a feast become more regal. May I invite you to a simple gospel feast?

I

When speaking of his ideal feast, Jesus spoke of unlikely dinner guests and illogical table seatings. "But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you" (Luke 14:10). The setting for many biblical covenants was a feast-meal shared by parties who might not have thought to sit down at a table together.

A few years ago, I participated in a training program for research assistants who would be interviewing long-term survivors of childhood cancer. Members of "Candlelighters" and their children were present to give the fledgling researchers a taste of "real life."² These families were not unlike those upon whom they would call to interview. The project director suggested a session of role-playing in which we would all be at a meal together.

Diane Komp is Professor of Pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, Attending Physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and past deacon of the First Congregational Church, Guilford, CT. Parts of this essay are taken from the book A Window to Heaven, copyright 1992, used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

¹ Author's translation of the praise-song, Unser Leben, copyright 1972 by Peter Janssens Music Publishers.
² "Candlelighters" is an organization of parents of children with cancer. The name is taken from the saying, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."

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One of the trainees found that proposition untenable. It was unrealistic, she said, to have the oncologist eating with the family. One of the participating children piped up, "No, you're wrong! I sat next to Dr. Komp at dinner last week." And so he had, prior to a support group for parents sponsored by "Candlelighters." The practice of medicine can be a vocation based upon covenantal relationship. Why should it be any exception to this type of meal-time pledge-making?³

My first such "covenantal feast" took place at the beginning of my training in pediatric oncology. I had just moved to a new city and attended a local church. It was a shock to find that the pastor of that church was the father of one of the patients I had just met at the hospital. Neither the father nor I had anticipated this unplanned meeting on his professional turf.

That Sunday he preached a heroic sermon, but he lacked the body language to match his carefully chosen words. His eyes were fixed uncomfortably on me as he preached and his voice grew progressively fainter. At one point, it became almost inaudible. My presence in the congregation seemed a symbolic reminder of his powerlessness over his son's illness, neutralizing valiant words as quickly as they were delivered.

The week after my visit to that church, the pastor took me by surprise when he invited me to dinner at their home. In this informal setting, I learned more about my young patient than a face-off in a doctor's office can ever reveal. In his home, it was my patient's turn to observe me and make important judgments about our future working relationship. The other beneficiary of that "nonprofessional" meeting was the pastor-dad. He had the opportunity to consider his own unusual situation and the unavoidable interaction of his private life with his public ministry.

In contrast to the sermon I heard that Sunday, Daniel Hans directly integrated his personal tragedy into pastoral work: "If I did not use my personal life as the basis for preaching during this time of crisis, would I have either an audience or a message for someone else's time of pain?"⁴ For this pastor who lost a child to cancer, authentic theology originated in pain. He could not properly feed his flock without addressing his own pain and that of the people who cared about their pastor.

In looking back over that most painful time of his life, Hans identified four qualities he believes should be present in the sermon of someone who chooses to preach from personal experience with pain: admitting the pain (vulnerability), allowing equal access for anger

³ See William May, The Physician's Covenant.- Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983) for an expanded treatment of the covenantal relationship between doctor and patient.
⁴ Daniel T. Hans, "Preaching through Personal Pain," Leadership, 1989, p. 34. Rev. Hans' daughter died from a brain tumor after a long illness. A lengthier treatment of his experience can be read in his book, God on the Witness Stand (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989).

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(honesty), looking at the moment and beyond (hope), and the grace of unanswered questions (patience).

As things have turned out for me, dinner with the pastor's family was only the first of many house calls where a meal was shared and a covenant was sealed. There would be other families to share in this way their vulnerability, honesty, hope, and patience.

II

Simple gospel feasts can be events of healing. Each of the Synoptic Gospels recounts the story of the healing of Simon Peter's mother-in-law. The woman rose from a sickbed after Jesus' touch to serve a meal to him and the disciples. (Matthew 8:14; Mark 1:30; Luke 4:38). I cannot read the mother-in-law's story without thinking of a very special house call and of a little saint who taught me the healing joy of servanthood.

Morphine moved silently and painlessly through a small butterfly needle taped to the skin of his abdomen. Donny⁵ called the device his "beeper" and smothered it with Smurf stickers. He was Doctor Donny, on call. For this nine year old "doctor" with Down's syndrome, the small battery-operated pump anchored to his pajama waist made it possible for him to stay at home and control the pain of terminal leukemia.

Hospice nurses came to adjust the dosage from time to time, and Donny moved from his bedroom to the living room where Smurf-bedecked sheets and pillowcases transformed the couch into a most acceptable base of operations. He had more friends than most of us will have in longer lifetimes and could visit with them all in between snoozes.

As the leukemia progressed, he had less energy and more cat naps. My phone rang one evening after the nurse had visited and told his parents that he might die that very night. His mother called to ask my opinion. When I arrived, Donny was dozing peacefully on his Smurf sofa, surrounded by a half-dozen assorted friends. He was paler than when I had last seen him, but his pulse was steady.

"I went out of the prophecy business a long time ago. I wish I could be sure, but you know how unpredictable these things are." As if on cue, Donny rose from his "deathbed" with a luxuriant yawn. The Prince of Smurfs was hungry and decided to take his guests "out" to dinner. He assumed the role of maitre d'hote at a mythical restaurant and escorted us to our tables.

Invisible pad and pen poised in his hand, Donny went from guest to guest, reciting the specials of the evening. For each guest, a different ethnic restaurant was presented with a complete selection from suppe to nuez. After he took the order from his last guest (in a Mexican restaurant), he flopped back into Smurfland and resumed his nap with a self-satisfied sigh of contentment.

⁵ Names and minor details have been altered to protect privacy.

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"It won't be tonight," I confidently prophesied, and Donny grinned in his sleep.

Oh, the pesky metaphor of the servant! To some, the Gospel story may read as if Simon Peter's mother-in-law was healed just in time to do slave duty for the men-folk. The irony for me is that just as some of my sisters feel called to move "beyond servanthood," I find myself called more and more to be a servant.⁶ It is precisely because the Master of paradox does not call me servant, but rather friend, that I know myself as his servant as well as his friend.⁷

There has been no better mirror in history of our struggle to be independent and in control than the serving woman's son-in-law. How little he seemed to learn about himself during his years at Jesus' side! "Peter said to him, 'You shall never wash my feet.' Jesus answered him, 'If I do not wash you, you have no part in me"' (John 13:8).

Just as we train researchers to see themselves in someone else's place, Jesus turned the tables when he washed the disciples' feet. My patients reflect Jesus back to me as his "blessed least" by role reversal. I am grateful for my little Donnys who serve and are served without bitterness and invite me to say with poor old Peter, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" (John 13:9).

For years after Donny's death, his mother continued to find Smurfs in closets and drawers where he hid them for her to find. At Christmas time, she remembers him standing by her side, dictating the placement of every ornament on the tree. There is no event in her life that does not recall the little servant she birthed and nurtured for nine years. Following his death, she went to work in a restaurant that employs adults with Down's syndrome. There, she teaches them how to invite others to the feast.

III

The invitation to the royal feast is written in child-friendly language, starting with an angel's visit to a faithful elderly man. Zechariah heard the news that he would father the Messiah's forerunner. The angel spoke to him of his son who...

. . . will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before [the Christ), to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. (Luke 1:17, emphasis mine)

Child psychiatrist Albert Solnit speaks with the spirit of Elijah, not the paradigms of the judicial system. There is a tone of prophecy in his recommendations that divorced parents should apply the wisdom of Solomon and the Golden Rule rather than to look out for their own

⁶ Cf. Susan Nelson Dunfee, Beyond Servanthood: Christianity and the Liberation of Women(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989).
⁷ Cf. John 15:14,15.

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interests in child custody.⁸ Solnit points out that the court system too often looks to the interests of the adults and wields the knife over the child to satisfy the parents-even when it would divide the child fatally.

My young patient Bill had four parents, but his prayer was for them to be one family, with one heart and a new spirit. At the time he was diagnosed with leukemia, Bill's biological parents and step-parents thought they were doing their best to survive divorce, remarriage, and the sharing of children. But they rarely shared a meal together.

What helped this family most to survive was living far away from each other and limiting their social intercourse to small-talk at drop off and pick up of the children. They were more successful than most similar families of our times, and Bill certainly did not seem damaged by belonging to a less than traditional American family unit. In fact, it was in the context of the reorganized family that he began to think about God.

The initial contact of the quartet of parents in the hospital was highly civil. When the stress of former spouses in daily contact finally hit, this group did the unprecedented. They knew the root source of their stress, and rather than displacing their family anger onto the medical staff, they talked to each other. Kathy was shocked to learn that she had more in common with her ex-husband's new wife than any other woman in her acquaintance. The mother and step-mother formed a nucleus for reconciliation and communication.

When Bill relapsed and his death appeared inevitable, he indicated a desire to die at home. In attempting to honor that request, we found that it would not be medically easy. He came to our hospital from a region distant from us that had no type of hospice care. With the help of a nurse in that community who volunteered to make home visits, the four parents lived under the same roof, sharing the nursing responsibilities. After Bill died, the family invited me to dinner.

The two mothers worked together in the kitchen on the meal. Both homes were in need of repairs. During the last weeks of Bill's illness, the two fathers made significant progress on the house where we met to eat. In the spring, they were planning to start together on the other house. They had shopped together to buy me a gift and talked of their future plans.

They talked about the holidays to come. No other friends or family members could really understand as well the anticipated emptiness of the year to come. Bill's birthday was near Christmas, and the holidays for all of them were irrevocably tied to that event. They planned to spend all the holidays from Thanksgiving through the New Year as an extended family. Through Bill and in Christ, they could come to feast together.

⁸ A. J. Solnit, "The Noncustodial Father: An Application of Solomonic Wisdom," in Fathers and Their Families, edited by Stanley H. Cath, Alan Gurwit and Linda Gunsberg (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1989).

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In human terms, the battle lines of truth and evil seem never more easily drawn than in failing marriage and divorce. In each such personal "holy war" for truth, the enemy seems only too clear to envision. Yet Christian philosopher Richard Mouw warns us, "The only two actors in the cosmic drama whose performances [for good and evil] we can count on are God and Satan.... Once we get to the level of human performance, the lines are more difficult to draw.... We will often misidentify truths and errors if we think in rigid 'us versus them' categories. We would do well to exercise caution in how we draw the battle lines. "⁹

Philosopher Mouw's and psychiatrist Solnit's words are wise, albeit seemingly impossible in terms of human understanding. Yet, we are told of a day when the lion shall eat straw with the lamb. Isaiah spoke of this day as one when unlikely animals will graze together in peace, wolf with lamb, leopard with kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together. The prophet speaks of a seemingly impossible feast day as one in which a little child shall lead the banquet guests to table together (Isaiah 11:6).

IV

The Gospel records of Jesus' simple feasts shared with his friends are memorable for the table talk. "While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples and said, 'Take, eat; this is my body'" (Matthew 26:26). He always seemed to find memorable words.

Words are vital to my profession. Whether searching for the right way to tell a family about cancer or writing about their children, I always seem to be reaching for the perfect (or if you prefer, predestined) word. Tony was a youngster who taught me a lot about symbolic communication when human words fail.

We first met when he was nine years old. Because of his illness, we were an important part of each others' lives for seven years. His life was drawing to a close in 1985 as I prepared for a sabbatical year away from New Haven. His parents knew that I would probably be out of the country when he died, but we protected each other from telling Tony. The colleague who would care for him in my absence gently chided me for my cowardice, and we faced something harder to say than that he would die from his disease.

His mom worried that I didn't know how deeply Tony felt about me although I never really felt uninformed. He had written letters to all his brothers, but he never thought to say goodbye to me. We both always assumed that we would be together for his departure from this life. I received an invitation to his home for a dinner that he himself would prepare.

On his next visit, Tony reviewed the menu with me, watching my eyes carefully for a hint of the respect due a chef of such competence.

⁹ Richard Mouw, Distorted Truth(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 18.

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En route to his home for that meal, my beeper indicated an emergency page. The chef had been taken to a nearby hospital with uncontrollable seizures. The dinner was postponed.

Tony was never quite the same after that episode. Intellectually and physically he was weaker, but spiritually he was stronger. We eventually did share a dinner of quiche and other of Tony's favorites at his home. After dinner, he invited me to his holy of holies to see his baseball card collection and to plot my biorhythms on his computer.

Several weeks later, the same computer drafted me a letter. He was afraid that I did not know how he felt about me and shared his love and his mischief in a letter that revealed all the nicknames he had for me and my colleagues. I'm glad to know he considered me "Kompetent."

My colleagues wrote to me in Germany to tell me how he had outlived all medical expectations. At Christmas, I flew home and had the opportunity for a visit with my young friend. He was hospitalized to receive a new medication but was in good health and spirits.

We faced off from bed to bedside, sizing each other up. I noticed that his hair had regrown and his face was no longer bloated from prednisone. He read my thoughts and countered, "Your hair is grayer but you lost weight. Do you dare to eat a quiche?"

It would turn out that I was not there when Eastertide became his Easter time. Towards the end of our Christmas visit, both Tony and I ran out of words and nodded in farewell. As I walked out of the room to return to Germany, he said softly, "Auf wiederseh'n."

Lord, you gather us from the east and the west, north and south for a royal banquet. Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God! There we will meet the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. May our lives be that sort of simple gospel feast: the spirit of Jesus be in our midst, the work of Jesus be in our hands, the spirit of Jesus be in our work. Lord, now let thy servants (thy served) depart in peace, according to thy word.