Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary C. Earle is a poet, author, and spiritual director, who taught at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. She has written ten books about spirituality. Her titles include Marvelously Made, Days of Grace, The Desert Mothers, and Broken Body, Healing Spirit. She resides in San Antonio, Texas.

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Beginning Again

Morehouse Publishing

Contents

Chapter One

* * *

It is September 1995. Home from the hospital, I am trying to figure out who in the world I am now. I have survived the initial crisis of an attack of acute pancreatitis. I stay in bed most of the day. I very slowly gain some strength. Some days I can eat without ill effect. Some days I cannot. Every pattern to which I have been accustomed has been completely disrupted. Before the pancreatitis I was a healthy, active, engaged woman—a wife, a mother, an Episcopal priest, a spiritual director, a writer. In a matter of hours all of those identities were turned inside out and upside down as the acute pancreatitis kidnapped my life as I knew it.

When pancreatitis moved through my life like an earthquake, the recovery period left me sufficiently weakened that I found it difficult or impossible to keep the established patterns of my own spiritual practices. I was accustomed to doing yoga, keeping a journal, reading scripture, and praying every morning. At the age of forty-six, I had also begun paying attention to nutrition, exercise, and leisure as part of my own intentional plan for living. All of this was shattered by the acute illness. I barely had the energy to lie on the couch and watch a movie, much less get up and pray. Much of my waking life was dedicated to a daily education about nutrition and the difficulties of living with a weakened pancreas. (My doctor had said, "Of all the organs in the body, the pancreas is the most mysterious. We really don't know exactly how it works.")

In those first months of recovery it felt as if my life were over. I had a lot of grieving to do, grieving for a life that was lost and for a body that was afflicted. I also succumbed to the prevalent cultural notion that once illness has visited like an unwelcome guest and has, in fact, changed from being a guest to a resident, your life is over. On the one hand, this is true. The life I had once lived was now irrevocably changed. My seemingly endless energy had evaporated like dew in the sun. My omnivorous appetite had to be confined to the simplest of diets, the smallest of portions, and even then I would often break out in a cold sweat from the labor involved in digestion.

It seemed that a life with boundless horizons had been reduced to a life of one limitation after another. Some days I felt as if I were turning over rocks in a dried-up streambed, looking for signs of life, only to discover more rocks. The fact that the ailment was pancreatitis made things more difficult in some ways. "Pancreatitis" is hardly a household word. I had to educate myself about the illness, about the recovery, about the chronic aspects of the ailment. When I was in the emergency room and the doctor informed me that I had acute pancreatitis, I had to ask where the pancreas was. I had hardly been aware that I had a pancreas, much less that its malfunction could create so much havoc.

All of these limitations affected not only me but also my whole family. My husband, Doug, had to assume many of the household duties. A good cook, he had to learn what I could eat and how it had to be prepared. He, too, lost his life as he knew it. A lot had to be renegotiated in terms of the marriage. On the one hand, the words "for better and for worse, in sickness and in health" took on a depth of meaning we'd not had to know before the illness. On the other one, the daily discovery of my own real weakness caused us both stress and distress.

I had to drop out of a doctoral program in which I was enrolled and curtail many activities. Travels, retreats, teaching opportunities—all had to be forsaken. As the months passed, the weakness deepened as I continued to lose weight. CT scans, ultrasounds, and blood tests did not show evidence of malignancy. Finally, we discovered that my body was failing to metabolize my food. Though I was eating, my body was not absorbing the nutrients. I was losing weight, my skin and hair were drying out, my vision was blurring. I'd managed to develop a vitamin deficiency because of the malabsorption difficulty.

Many of you who are reading this book have suffered far worse than I. Many of you have lived with people whose lives have been completely altered by illness in one of its acute, chronic, or progressive forms. You know that living with illness is the reality. The illness is not likely to disappear. In fact, it becomes a major defining force in daily life. The illness comes with limitations and distress, with diminishments and loss. In the predominant culture of the United States, this is often construed to mean that whatever life might look like with illness, it is not lively. Nor is it creative. The possibility that it offers strange gifts under the guise of limitation is unimaginable. And it certainly could not be spiritual! Such are the prevailing misconceptions in our culture.

Living with Illness and a Rule of Life

For years before becoming ill, I lived with a simple rule of life. A rule of life, a simple monastic concept, helps us to become more mindful of divine presence throughout the day, in all persons and in all circumstances. The word "rule" is derived from the Latin word regula. It connotes guidance and wisdom rather than a rigid code. To follow a rule is to walk "in a path of life" (Psalm 16:11). A rule, like a path of life, is adopted and learned over time. It is not internalized all at once. It requires steadily putting one foot in front of the other (at least metaphorically) in order to reach the destination.

My own pre-illness rule of life was influenced by both the Cursillo movement and by the Rule of Saint Benedict. The former, a renewal movement that emphasizes a life marked by prayer, study, and action, began to have an effect on me after I attended a Cursillo weekend in 1979. At roughly the same time, I became aware of the Rule of Saint Benedict, an ancient rule of life dating from the sixth century. This rule, or guide for Christian living, emphasizes a life marked by prayer, holy reading, and manual labor, with vows of stability, obedience, and ongoing transformation and conversion. The Rule of Benedict is grounded in the practice of listening deeply to God and to all of life. Benedict also invites us to prefer nothing to Christ. With common sense and gentleness, Benedict provides for life in community that respects the young, the ill, and the elderly. His is a vision of shared life in Christ, with every member of the community seeking God. At the same time, his Rule is grounded in daily reality. Benedict addresses areas as simple as the tools of the monastery, clothing, food, and how to treat guests. The Rule, as Benedictine sister and author Joan Chittister explains, "simply takes the dust and clay of every day and turns it into beauty." While we don't know a great deal about Benedict, we do know that he was born around 480 C.E. to a fairly well-to-do family. He lived in Nursia in Italy, during a time of intense upheaval in Europe. Rome itself had been invaded in 410 C.E. by tribes from the north of Europe. Much that had been known and trusted within his society had been destroyed by ongoing warfare. Benedict studied in Rome, but became disillusioned by the behavior he saw in the city, so he dropped out of school and left the city. From there he...