Parables of Grace and Gratitude
November 15, 2009
The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
It's a sunny autumn day. The light of the morning sun is shining through the windows of an intensive care unit into patient rooms filled with IV stands and ventilators and heart monitors. In one room, the light reveals the jaundiced face of a 45-year-old teacher dying of liver failure. Next door, an ashen-faced 62-year-old grandfather needs a new heart. Three doors down, the light falls on the face of a 27-year-old mother who gasps for breath with ruined lungs.
None of them has walked in the light for weeks. They are doing all they can just to live another day.
They are waiting for a gift. It is a priceless gift. It is priceless because of what it will give them: new life and health and time with their families; and also because of what it costs the life of someone else. How do you pray for a new heart when you know that it comes from someone else's death?
In another hospital, a family grieves. Someone they love has died and the autumn sunlight is swallowed in darkness.
Someone tells them of the possibility of donating their loved one's organs. They say it would be just like their loved one to want to help someone else. They talk about sparing some other family the pain that they are experiencing. So they choose to give the priceless gift to nameless strangers.
A 45-year-old teacher receives a liver, a 62-year-old grandfather receives a heart, and a 27-year-old mother receives new lungs. They all pray for a grieving family they may never know.
As a hospital chaplain, Joel deFehr has been with all of these people, and more. He says it is a miracle for those who might have died, and also a miracle for those who gave. What a profound and wonderful miracle. What a parable of grace and gratitude.
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When Ann Fisher sent an e-mail to the Worship Associates a couple of months ago, informing us that this weekend had been designated “National Organ Donor Sabbath,” and suggesting that we might want to present a worship service on the topic, I thought to myself, “Organ donation? What could possibly be inspiring about that?!” I have the little pink dot on my drivers license, designation me as an organ donor when I die; and I assumed everyone else has one too! What’s the big deal? I thought.
But perhaps because I trust Ann’s sense of worship, and her dedication to this church, I kept my skepticism to myself (this is the first she’s heard of it), and I said I’d deliver a sermon on the subject. But my resistance remained. And then I began reading some of the stories such as that I shared a moment ago.
There was the story told by Catholic chaplain Father Michael Lynch, about the 15-year-old girl who died in an auto accident on Good Friday – the day that Christians mark the crucifixion of Jesus. Father Lynch sat with her parents as they weighed whether to allow her organs to be donated, and he offered them solace as they grieved the loss of their beloved daughter.
Two days later, early on Easter Sunday, Father Lynch learned that the girl’s heart had been successfully transplanted into a teenage boy in New York; that her kidneys had been given to a couple of adults; and that her bone tissue had gone to several people in the Midwest. All these strangers were given new life by that 15-year-old girl; she lives on in them.
Another story described a 22-year-old woman who told her family one day, just out-of-the-blue, that if she were to die, she’d want parts of her body to be given to those in need of them. Her parents were puzzled by this announcement that seemed premature. But not too long after that, the young woman was, in fact, killed in an auto accident, and her heart was given to a man who had been waiting for four years for such a life-saving gift. That man was her father. His daughter now lives on in him.
And then there was the 47-year-old woman who died suddenly from a brain aneurism. It was a tragedy for her family, of course, and at first they refused to donate her organs because they thought it went against their religion. But when their rabbi told them that in fact such an act wasn’t forbidden by Jewish law, and instead was considered a “tremendous mitzvah” – or commandment, and the highest form of saving a life, they allowed her organs to be taken.
And so from her, one kidney went to a 76-year-old father of three who had been on dialysis for six years, and the other kidney to a 50-year-old woman. In her death, this woman gave two others new life.
According to the Southern California donor transplant network called One Legacy, one organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people, and a tissue donor may save or enhance the lives of as many as fifty people! And while bones, corneas, hearts, heart valves, kidneys, livers, lungs, skin, tendons, and veins are among the body parts that can be harvested from a deceased donor, there are also a remarkable number of ways one can be a donor while still very much alive!
And yet, approximately seventeen people die each day while waiting for some organ transplant that could save their life. In California alone, approximately 22,000 people are on a waiting list for an organ or tissue transplant; and nationally, over 100,000 are waiting. Think of the possibilities if everyone just agreed to become an organ donor upon their death; think of the grace they would bring to the lives of these thousands waiting, and the gratitude that would be expressed.
Susan was a 45-year-old woman in one of my previous congregations, who was rushed to the hospital one afternoon with intense pain. It took the doctors a while to realize that she was bleeding internally from an aneurism, and she died an hour later during surgery. I had been by her bedside before they took her to surgery, and I was with her husband when the doctors told him of her death. Later that evening, I spoke with one church member after another, all of us trying to comprehend how this could have happened to someone so full of life.
Her memorial service a week later was a beautiful celebration of her life, recounting all the ways in which she had blessed our lives through her acts of kindness and her commitment to justice. But we were also able to add to those blessings the fact that she was an organ donor upon her death; someone would be getting a chance to live because of Susan.
So why don’t we all sign up to be donors? It doesn’t cost us anything – no money or time spent just to sign up. What’s our resistance about?
Perhaps in part we resist thinking about it for the same reason that so many of us resist completing “Advanced Directives,” giving instructions for what to do for us as we approach the end of our lives. It’s not pleasant thinking about our own death, and it’s even less pleasant making actual decisions about our death. So we simply avoid it.
But there are also a lot of misconceptions about organ donations.
* People think that it’s financially costly to donate one’s organs, but there’s no cost at all to the donor.
* People think that once we’re no longer young, we have nothing to donate. But organ donations are accepted from persons as young as just a few weeks old to persons 75 and older. It’s remarkable what parts of us can still be used in old age.
*Those of us concerned about justice may fear how decisions are made about who will receive donated organs and tissue. But, according to Legacy One, neither race, gender, age, income or celebrity status is ever a consideration.
* And people think that their religious tradition forbids organ transplants. If you watched the very funny HBO special with comedian Wanda Sykes a couple of weeks ago, you saw her rail against such prohibitions. “What kind of God do you have,” she asked indignantly, “that doesn’t allow you to give your organs away when you die? You think if you give your eyes to someone so they can see, that when you get to Heaven, God’s gonna’ be all angry – say, ‘What?! You came here without any eyes – can’t even see all this beautiful Heaven I brought you to?!”
Wanda believes that any God worth worshipping would be too loving to disapprove of organ donation; and in fact, it turns out that that’s what most religions believe as well.
Baptists, Mormons and Roman Catholics view the donation of one’s organs as an act of charity and love; all four branches of Judaism, including Orthodox, encourage it as an “obligation” when it will save a life; Islam says that it is a “necessity to procure the noble end” of saving human life; even Jehovah’s Witnesses can donate their organs as long as all blood is removed first. And why wouldn’t this be true? Wasn’t the first organ donor Adam – who gave one of his ribs to create Eve?!
Not surprisingly, Unitarian Universalism, while having no official statement about it, generally “affirms the value of organ and tissue donation.” And why wouldn’t we, when we hold up the values of compassion, and the worth of every person, and the interdependence of us all?
In our memorial services, we speak of the gifts we give from the way we live – just like Badger in this morning’s children’s story. Allowing our bodies to sustain the life of another, especially when our own life can no longer be sustained, is the most reasonable and loving extension of that idea.
So there really is no reason not to sign up to be an organ donor; I imagine that many of you already have, since it’s pretty easy to do whenever we renew our drivers license. There are also some little cards that can be kept in your wallet, giving permission for your organs or even your body to be donated; I have some of those with me if you would like to fill one out.
But in addition to registering as an organ donor, it’s really important that we let our loved ones know that this is what we want done when we die; otherwise, it might not happen. If you haven’t had that conversation with them yet – and I’m one of those who hasn’t, I encourage you to do so. Who knows? Maybe letting our families know our wishes for ourselves will motivate them to make the same decision for themselves. And then they and we will become part of the beautiful parables of grace and of gratitude; we will truly live on through the lives of others.
In closing, I offer you a reflection by Robert N. Test, called “To Remember Me:”
The day will come when my body will lie upon a white sheet neatly tucked under four corners of a mattress located in a hospital busily occupied with the living and the dying.
At a certain moment a doctor will determine that my brain has ceased to function and that, for all intents and purposes, my life has stopped.
When that happens, do not attempt to instill artificial life into my body by the use of a machine. And don't call this my death bed. Let it be called the Bed of Life, and let my body be taken from it to help others lead fuller lives.
Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face, or love in the eyes of a woman.
Give my heart to a person whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain.
Give my blood to the teen-ager who was pulled from the wreckage of her car, so that she might live to see her grandchildren play.
Give my kidneys to one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week.
Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body, and find a way to make a crippled child walk.
Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that someday, a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat, and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against her window.
Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.
If you must bury something, let it be my faults, my weaknesses and all prejudice against my fellow human beings.
Give my sins to the devil. Give my soul to God.
If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you.
If you do all I have asked, I will live forever.
May our lives be rich with meaning, and filled with an abundance of love and joy. But when the time comes for us to take our last breath, may our soul journey to wherever souls go, and may our bodies be used to give new life to others. In this way, may we gain everlasting life. Amen.
© 2007-2011 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
