Dr Sheila Cassidy is one of my heroes. I read her autobiography, Audacity to Believe in the late 1970s. Her account of her torture by the DINA, the Chilean secret police under Pinochet, was harrowing and told with honesty about the terror and loneliness of those months. Her crime was that, as a medical doctor, she treated a revolutionary activist. On her return to the UK she eventually returned to medicine becoming the Medical Director of St Luke's Hospice in Plymouth. During those years she wrote several books which remain important documents about the interface of faith and suffering, and the interface of human beings helping each other through the hardest miles of their journey.
In that earlier book, Audacity to Believe, she tells of her confusion and inner searching. She wasn't looking for answers. She was looking for direction, purpose and meaning. There is a wonderful afternoon when she is recovering, and sitting in the middle of a park, on top of a pile of leaves, with a layer of leaves all around. This, she says, was to prevent anyone approaching her unnoticed, because she wanted to pray, that is, to have a straight heart- exposed, everything out in the open talk with God. She senses God was asking her for commitment; not a commitment, but the commitment of her life, the kind of surrender in which all other commitments are handed over to God. The image that formed in her mind was of a blank cheque. She should sign it and hand it over. It took a long time of arguing until, within her heart, she signed the blank cheque, handed it over, and invited God to fill in the cost.
It is a remarkable passage of writing, an account of authentic spiritual encounter, when an ordinary day becomes pivotal, and all that came before and comes afterwards is interpreted in the light of that single irrevocable yes. In the hard work of discernment, that process of self-examination and imaginative receptiveness to life's possibilities, there comes a time of decision, and risk. When Jesus said, Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be yours also", that wasn't a promise we would get everything we wanted. It was a promise that in seeking first of all God's rule in our lives, all other wants become ordered, secondary and means to the chosen end, obedience to God.
Cassidy's life has not been easy or straightforward since those earlier years. In her two books Sharing the Darkness and Good Friday People, she explains her sympathy with human suffering, her commitment to healing, and describes her professional involvement in alleviating the pain and grief of others. Accompanying the dying, and intentionally and selflessly sharing the darkness with those who "walk through the valley of the shadow of death", takes its toll. That blank cheque proved to incur a lifetime of self-expenditure. In one chapter she tells about the inner life of the doctor, the one whose calling is to offer pallliative care, and to do so not only through the pharmacological miracles of modern pain control, but through personal investment in companionship, shared anguish and serial loss. One way of coping was to look for the sign of the cross in the everyday environments she inhabited - in the hopsice, her home, on the commute, wherever she had to time and energy to pay attention.
The cross is the place where all human anguish and loss intersects with a Love that is eternal, infinitely self-giving, and inclusive in its embrace of every sufferer. The cruciform image has, for that reason, become an important symbol that gives structure and cogency to hope. If God loves like that, and if such suffering can be redemptive; and if on the cross love overcomes hate and, in the end, death is eclipsed by life, then there awaits beyond the tragedy and loss of human suffering, a mystery that evades our capture, but which reaches to the very depths of all that gives us being.
Though she does not quote the words, Cassidy's life work, from Chile to Plymouth and further still, has been an experiemntal, at times unwitting, living out of the truth embedded in the words of the philosopher theologian who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (4.15-16)
In ways beyond our knowing, the Crucified God enters the darkness and refuses to leave without us. To receive mercy, and to find grace, is to discover the real, eternal, and final meaning of the cross. There are times when mercy and grace are mediated to us through the lovingkindness, faithful patience, and costly compassion of others. Somewhere, sometime, in their lives, they too handed over a blank cheque.
There is a poignant, and realistic footnote in Cassidy's telling of that day in the park. She tells of how, often, she took back the cheque she signed, '"from the hands that held it so lightly", tore it up and threw it in the rubbish bin. And how, each time, she took the pieces, "taped them together, signed it once more, and handed it back, stained with tears and grubby, but still valid." I know of few pieces of spiritual writing that capture more precisely the oscillation of obedience and self-will in the heart of any of us who desire to serve God so faithfully, and fail so often.
The photo is of a mirror in one of our favourite cafes. The cruciform image surrounded by mirrors means that to stand in front of it is to see yourself in the light of the cross, and to see the cross intersecting with all of life around us, and including our own. Cassidy's habit of looking for that image of cruciformity has become for me a form of theological reflection. Such thinking has multiple starting points, each of which leads back eventually to the central truth of who and what God is. Each one of us journeys through times and places of darkness. Such experiences change us, expose our weakness and our very great need to "receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need"The cross is the place where that happened once and for all, and still happens today.
Recent Comments