Sermon: Holding onto the Man in the Boat
In the summer of 2022, I took Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short, which is basically an introduction to chaplaincy, or rather, what amounts to an immersion crash course in pastoral care in a hospital setting. After only a few weeks of visiting patients I was assigned to visit a woman named Linda, a cancer patient. One of the staff chaplains came in and explained that this was an error, because Linda was her patient. “However,” she said, why don’t you go visit her anyway, and then come and tell me about it.” “Okay,” I agreed.
I went to her room, knocked on the open door, announced politely that I was from Chaplaincy services, and was warmly invited inside. Linda was a beautiful young woman, probably in her mid-forties. The smile on her face could not conceal the fact that she was experiencing some poorly controlled pain. There was a nurse in the room, taking her vitals and giving her some medications, and I hoped that included some pain meds. But as the nurse was leaving, Linda asked when she was due for her next dose of pain medication, and winced when the nurse indicated that it wasn’t due for several hours. I sat down in a chair beside her bed and introduced myself, and asked her, what, if anything, I could do for her.
Linda sat up, wincing, pulled out a brochure, opened to a page titled “Forgiveness” and pointed to it, and asked, “Can you tell me, how do you forgive someone who has already died?” This was certainly not what I expected her to say
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure I really understood the question. I explained to her that forgiving someone who has died is the same as forgiving someone who is still alive—that it’s more than just saying the words, “I forgive you” for whatever they did that hurt. Forgiveness involves letting go of the anger, the resentment, the frustration, and the pain and the hurt that whatever the person said or did, or maybe what they didn’t say or do, that upset you, disappointed you, caused you harm, or damaged your relationship. And I told her that you can do this at any time, even after the person is gone—and even if the person never said he, or she, was sorry, or asked to be forgiven. She looked at me in silence.
“Who is it you need to forgive,” I asked. “My mother,” Linda responded. “She died a few years ago.” She looked down at the brochure in her hands. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I put my hand on her shoulder. “Would it help to talk about it?” She nodded.
Linda explained that her mother had always made her feel inadequate—like she was never good enough, never perfect enough, even as child growing up. She never felt like she measured up in anything, in any sense. Her mother expected her to be perfect, and she wasn’t; she couldn’t be. And her mother never apologized for expecting and demanding the impossible. They were never as close as she wanted them to be. Her feelings of inadequacy had created a wall between them. And Linda was still holding onto the pain, the anger, the resentment.
We talked for a little while, and then she changed the subject. “I’m trying to hold on to the man in the boat.” I didn’t expect that either, but I knew from the way she said it, that she was talking about Jesus. “That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “Holding on to Jesus is always the right thing to do.”
I could see her medication was wearing off, and her pain was getting worse. So, I offered to lead her through some guided meditation that I found helpful when I was in pain, if she wanted to try it. She did. I had her lie back and imagine she was lying in her favorite place, wherever that may be. Linda was a MN girl, so naturally she was lying in the grass near a lake, listening to the waves hit the shore. I had her breathe in and out, deeply, several times, establishing a rhythm, focusing on the feeling of the grass beneath her, the sun on her face, the breeze blowing over her, the sounds of the lake. Then I had her imagine a warm ball of light descend upon her head, and into her body, warming and relaxing each part of her body as it traveled slowly down from her head to her toes, melting away the tension and the pain, and then taking it away as it slowly moved back up to her head and out of her body, but left behind a small, warm glow that represents the soothing presence of the Holy Spirit. A few more deep breaths, and she was instructed to open her eyes slowly and come back to the room. Linda opened her eyes and indicated that she felt much better, that the pain was more tolerable. I asked if I might say a prayer over her. She nodded, so I prayed, and left the room.
The chaplain came to see me when I returned to learn about my visit with Linda. She asked whether I felt we had made a connection. I told her about the visit, and told her that, yes, I felt like we had connected. The chaplain smiled, and told me that I should continue to visit her. Then she showed me how to assign a patient to myself, so that no one else would be assigned to visit her. Then the chaplain told me that Linda was at a crossroads: she was deciding whether to choose to undergo one last round of treatments and continue fighting what was likely a losing battle, or to go into hospice.
After that, I be began visiting Linda twice each week. We always began with guided meditation, and then we would talk. We talked about her mother, and her son. We talked about memories, and how, according to research, every time we recall a memory, we re-create it. Each time we remember it, depending on how we interpret it, or feel about it, we can make it better or worse than the actual event. We talked about how forgiving someone is good for us, because holding onto the pain, anger and resentment is unhealthy, and how it becomes a heavier and heavier weight that we bear—and how it can overwhelm us, even sink our boat and drag us down to the bottom of the lake. We talked about how holding on to anger can cause it to fester and result in increased emotional and physical pain, and can interfere with other relationships. We talked about giving her mother the benefit of the doubt, assuming that she always did the best she could at the time, and how mothers protect their children, and never let them know all the things they are struggling with, that might explain what is going on. We talked about happier memories, and about good things she learned or inherited from her mother, and about how good a mother she was to her son, and always made sure he knew he was more than good enough. We even talked a little about my mother, whom I had buried only the previous summer.
And we talked about the boat, and the man in the boat. Linda never referred to Jesus in any other terms. For her, Jesus was always the man in the boat—the man she needed to hold on to with all her might, and never let go, no matter what. We never once talked about her cancer, or hospice or continued treatments or dying or even fear of dying. Linda was focused solely on forgiveness and holding on to the man in the boat tossed by the storm. Her faith and her tenacity were inspirational.
Linda knew she was in a boat, in a storm, but she wasn’t alone. Jesus was in the boat with her. All she had to do was hold tight to that man in the boat, and the storm would pass, and whatever happened, life would continue, if she just held on to the man in the boat. And she knew that, if she could just let go of the weight of pain and anger, if she could just forgive her mother, then she could hold on to the man in that boat with both hands.
I visited Linda four or five times, and she was always happy to see me, always full of complicated questions about forgiveness and love. Then one day, I went to her room and found it filled with nurses and orderlies, all bustling around the room, removing tubes and IVs and disconnecting her from monitoring equipment, and giving her what sounded like discharge instructions. As always, Linda welcomed me, this time with more cheer and exuberance than ever before. I though perhaps I should offer to come back later, but Linda never gave me the chance.
“Oh, Karen! Hi! I’m so glad you came. I was afraid I wouldn’t get the chance to see you again.” Linda was being transferred. A room had opened up in a wonderful hospice across town, and she had taken it. She would be leaving very soon. She summoned me to her bedside and gave me a big hug, then introduced me to her husband, who was standing across the room by the window, trying to stay out of the way, as “the chaplain I told you about.”
Then she said, “I need you to say a prayer for me.” I told her, I’d be happy to do that. She explained, “I want you to say a prayer to let my mother know I’ve forgiven her. And I want it to be you that does it, because you are the one who made it possible. You helped me to forgive her. And don’t worry, I can do the meditation by myself now. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can hear your voice, guiding me.” Then she took my hands, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I know this won’t be the last time I see you. In fact, I’ll be first in line to greet you when you get there. I’m holding on to the man in the boat.” And then she gave me another huge hug. So, I prayed for her, just as she had asked me to, that God might let her mother know she was loved and forgiven, and that Jesus would stay by her side, hold tight to her, and bring her to the place he had prepared especially for her. Then I gave her one last hug, and said good-bye, promising I would remember her, too.
Linda was still holding on to the man in the boat…with both hands now.
For Linda, the storm wasn’t the cancer. She had accepted that her fight with cancer was a losing battle. She had already surrendered before I met her. Jesus had already calmed the storm, and she was seeing clearly. The dilemma for Linda, was baggage. She knew that in Jesus was life—abundant and eternal life. Wherever the boat docked, if she was still holding on to Jesus, life would go on, eternally. But she was carrying baggage that she was having trouble leaving behind. She had held on to that hurt, that anger, that resentment for so long, it had become part of her, part of her identity. She had a death grip on that weight, and had to pry herself free, in order to hold on to Jesus, hold on to life. She wanted Jesus to have his hands free to steer the boat. She knew that if the boat sank, that baggage would drag her to the bottom of the lake, away from Jesus. She knew that she couldn’t hold on to both Jesus and that baggage. She knew that the boat was approaching a threshold, a narrow threshold that she couldn’t get through unless she set that baggage aside. She knew it and she was determined not to let that baggage separate her from Jesus, from life on the other side of that storm. So, she let it go. I didn’t really help her do it. That was Jesus. That was her faith. I was just a sounding board. I was purely privileged to ride in that boat with Linda and Jesus for a few days while she figured out how to let go of something that she no longer wanted or needed—something that had been keeping her from living fully and abundantly for decades.
My dear friends, we are all, each and every one of us, floating in our own little boat on the lake. And like Linda, none of us are alone in our boat. Jesus is in that boat with us. Now and then a storm comes up on that lake, and we have to hold on to Jesus, trusting him to get us safely through the storm. If we’re smart, we let Jesus steer the boat, and we just hold on to him until the weather clears, until the lightning and thunder and the rain stop, until the wind and the waves subside. But if we fill that boat up with enough worldly baggage, there won’t be enough room for Jesus. We need Jesus in that boat. And we need to hold on to him with both hands, and let everything else go. We can’t hold on to any baggage in this world, and still hold on to Jesus with both hands, with all our might.
For each one of us, there will eventually come a final storm that carries our boat to a distant shore, never to return. There is no baggage allowed on that voyage. And we can’t steer our own boat through that storm, because only Jesus knows the way to through that storm to that distant shore. All we can do is hold on to Jesus—hold on to that man in the boat with both hands and all of our might, because as long as we stick with Jesus, there is life on the other side of that storm. Because Jesus is life, the way the truth and the life, and that life is the light of the world, the light of all mankind. So, no matter what happens, hold on to the man in the boat. Hold on to Jesus with both hands, and never let go. Because where Jesus is, there is life, abundant life, eternal life.