Some Things I have Learned From Living on the Edge by Richard Birdsall

The other day a friend forwarded me an email sent to him by his friend and retired pastor - Richard Birdsall. His words touched me as I read them, and I could see how the gift of his cancer did indeed transform and contribute to his personal healing and finding the peace within that so calls to all of us. I for one am glad that he broke from tradition, and wrote these words that have so inspired many others to start thinking outside of the box.

Living on the edge may help give energy for our wings to take flight!


SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM LIVING ON THE EDGE
(Authors permission to share)

Sermon by Richard Birdsall

I Cor. 13

I know what I am about to do this morning is not very traditional, but I would like to share with you something about my experience of living with cancer and what it has taught me about life, death, love, peace and God. I want to do this because we all know people with cancer or we might even be diagnosed with it ourselves. What I am going to share with you is not unique but very individual, and yet it has some very strong universal characteristics. People living with cancer have an immediate connection when meeting. It is almost like we know each other because we share a common disease even though we may not have ever met. We have, in one way or another, walked the same road and share some common experiences.

When you receive the diagnosis of cancer, especially when there is no realistic hope of a cure, you are suddenly in a whole new world. It is both awful and yet amazing, it is terrifying and yet invigorating, it is grieving and yet you are alive like never before. You experience life at a whole other level, every feeling, every emotion, every experience, every touch, every friend, every sunrise or sunset or even a flower are suddenly appreciated at a level never before experienced. It is horrible and yet marvelous at the same time as you realize you may be dying and yet you are suddenly so much more alive than ever before and everything around you takes on more meaning than you ever thought possible. It is what I call “living on the edge” and it is difficult to experience and maintain when your health is good and you take life so much for granted. Believe it or not when I am in remission I miss living on the edge. I have difficulty maintaining it because I am not in crisis. I try hard to live with appreciation and gratitude but I have to work at it because the crisis of dying is not imminent. Once you have experienced it your whole life is changed. I wish I could have discovered this without the disease but I don’t think, at least not for me, it would have been possible.

LIVING ON THE EDGE MEANS LIVING WITH A SENSE OF GRATITUDE.

You suddenly have a new appreciation for almost everything. All of life, everything has new color. There is almost a compulsion to thank everyone around you for their love and friendship, every relationship takes on new value, you find yourself studying the features of your loved ones, the lines in their faces, the shape of their hands, the way they move and laugh; you see things in them that you simply overlooked before, you just want to grab them and hug the living daylights out of them and tell them how much you love them and thank them for giving their love to you in return. You find yourself saying over and over again to your spouse “thank you for loving me”. You feel so blessed, so grateful and you are overwhelmed with thanksgiving. Going through this I began to realize we are built for survival if we give and receive love messages. This, it seems to me, is the core of our essential humanity whose nature is peace and whose expression is thought and whose action is giving and receiving love. Thus this passage of scripture this morning, so familiar to all of us: in essence what Paul is saying here is----------if you don’t know how to give and receive love, you miss what life is all about; you miss what it means to be a human being, you can do everything right but if you have not love the only sound you make is like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Without giving and receiving love our life song is out of tune, nothing more than musical dissonance, off key with no harmony in our lives, no pure life music, only sounds that hurt the ear. That’s what one’s life is like without love. Love is basic to our humanity; it is our core. The old song is right-------- ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE----- “RA TADA TADA”.

You also marvel at the world around you, sometimes you stop and close your eyes and just listen to the sounds of life. Even a smallest insect that sometimes we just squash without even thinking about it becomes a marvel in and of itself because it contains life, a marvelous life of its’ own. You look at mountains differently, you get as close as you can to a flower and look at the detail, the intricacy of each petal, and you are so thankful to be able just to hold it in total amazement. All of life is filled with loving intensity.

LIVING ON THE EDGE HAS OPENED THE DOOR TO GAIN A GREAT DEAL OF SELF KNOWLEDGE.

You learn so much about yourself so fast that it is a roller coaster ride, new ideas, fresh thoughts, internal understanding all rush into your consciousness with such speed you can hardly take it all in. Our disease can speak to us and if we open the doors of perception I think we may be amazed at what comes in and you realize that you can use your pain for personal transformation. Somehow you understand that if you die you want to die healed and if you are going to survive you have to change in order to heal. You realize the only time you can be alive is in the moment, the Buddhists call it “living mindfully.” You stop feeling sorry for yourself because even in the midst of dying you begin to realize that this whole process is worth every minute because you have learned so much about yourself. Cancer has been a wake up call for me, I have been graced with cancer, it has been the best teacher I have ever had, I have had some great teachers who have given me ideas, but this one has taught me to experience my life. How can I not be grateful for being blessed in this way?

LIVING ON THE EDGE HAS TUGHT ME HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO FIND YOUR PEACE.

I had an appointment with my Dr. a week and a half ago, I want to go off my medication for a while just to see if we can find something else that works, he said “you and your cancer have a symbiotic relationship,” “I said that is correct, I decided a long time ago not to fight cancer but to make a deal with it and it went like this. “We can work this out, we can live together, I am not asking you to die but don’t kill me either for if you do then we both die, let’s just plan to live together.” I stopped praying for instant healing, for God told me to stop my complaining, that God had given me everything I need and to just trust it. My prayer then changed to “whatever the future holds I will receive it as a gift from your hand.” I turned it over, I practiced the discipline of relinquishing. And I began to heal, not be cured but began to heal and I found my peace. I became aware that I was able to relax with my disease as never before. Finding your peace is so important. We are all terminal, we are all going to die, none of us are going to get out of this thing alive. So it is not really, when you stop to think about it, whether we live or die but how are we going to live? How do I find my peace? I think people who survive learn how to embrace life and find their peace rather than trying to figure out how to avoid death.

LIVING ON THE EDGE HAS TAUGHT ME MORE ABOUT GOD

God is so much greater than our personal or pet theologies; God is not going to stay inside the box of our dogmatic belief systems. As I said during our last communion service, “when we come before God we do not come with all our accomplishments, all of our comforts, all of our titles, not even all our wealth or power. God is simply not interested in the kind of stuff we strive for here on this earth. We come before God stripped naked, barefoot with only our soul in our cupped hands, all of our theologies and pet belief systems are to no avail. We come with nothing and when we do that we realize the marvelous grace, healing forgiveness and the accepting love of God. We do not have to perform, we can just be. I think only when we are able to do that do we find out who we really are and become free to be nothing more than that and yet everything we were meant to be. No pretence, no wondering what other people think, no one upmanship or trying to be accepted or to impress, you are free to become the person God meant you to be. You can call it being born again, being converted or whatever, it does not matter; God in Jesus finds us and when that happens we find ourselves as well.” I keep telling my grandkids, “no one can live your life for you, your life is your gift and if you fail to live it no one else can do it for you. Find out who you are.”

Jesus was his own person and seeks us out so that we can find out who we are as well. He did not live inside the box, he broke with tradition, with orthodoxy, with the culture of the day; he loved everyone he met and in the process broke down all kinds of barriers that have a tendency to divide and separate people from their own humanity. We all bleed the same way.

Again in the words of Ellie Wiesel, “When I stand before the judgment, God will not ask me why I did not become a messiah, or why didn’t you find a cure for cancer? The only thing we are going to be asked at that precious moment is why didn’t you become you?”

When I was pastor of the church in Issaquah, once a month I used to hold services at a local care center in a division that was marked “Senile Ward”. I guess now we would call it an Alzheimer’s unit. It was a locked room, most of the people in there could not hold a conversation, they could remember the old hymns and could recite the Lord’s Prayer but that was about it. There was one lady I will never forget, she had long gray hair and when I went to shake her hand she would gently take my hand put it up to her lips, kiss my hand and say to me, “You are such a beautiful person.” Every time she did that it moved me, she touched my heart with her words. The fact that she said the same thing to everyone who greeted her made no difference. I will never forget her. I keep her alive by telling this story whenever I can. In doing so I honor her. Here was a woman supposedly mentally incompetent doing for me what few sane people have ever done, the simple act of kissing my hand and telling me how beautiful I was. That act and those words still linger in my mind; they still move me whenever I think about them. We can do that for each other, if not literally then by the way we treat each other. And God does that hundreds of times a day, ------------every day. God kisses us, warts and all, and whispers into our lives over and over until we begin to believe it, words of grace------“you are a beautiful person.”

Note: Bernie Siegel’s book “ Peace, Love and Healing” has helped me understand what I was experiencing. Other books: Norman Cousin’s “Anatomy of an Illness”, Siegel’s “Love, Medicine & Miracles, Joan Borysenko’s “Minding the Body, Mending the Mind”, Carl Simonton’s “Getting Well Again” are just a few of the many others that have been helpful to me. There are other concepts, which are also important, but how much can you get into one sermon?