An Acceptable Sacrifice

Home Sweet Ambulance

I can’t accept that I am doing enough to serve God and my neighbors. Everything I do seems like straw when compared to everything I could be doing.

For perspective, so readers might know where I'm coming from, here’s an overview of my schedule for the next little while:

Between now and Tuesday the 31st (that’s three weeks from today), I am working two eight-hour night shifts at hospice, three eight hour day shifts at the hospital, five 12-hour day shifts at the hospital, six 12-hour night shifts on the ambulance (I can sleep if there aren’t any calls, but I stay in-station), and two 12-hour day shifts on the ambulance. If I did my math right, that averages 65 hours per week of service work in health care, some of which I am paid for (hospice and the hospital) and some of which I am not (the ambulance). I didn’t factor in any of my Quaker commitments, but there are a few committee meetings and gatherings thrown into that lot.

It never, ever, feels like enough. All of this time I have given, and it does not feel as if it is an acceptable sacrifice to God.

What is going on here?

Sacred Harp

I live in a region of New England in love with its tradition. I met my husband at a contra dance; several friends are Morris dancers (and had their side perform at their wedding). I play the Irish fiddle, and Rob plays the mandolin. Suffice to say, I’m steeped in New England folk tradition . . . so how did I miss Sacred Harp until now? (Yes, it’s considered more Southern than from New England . . . but many of the hymns originated here, and it's quite popular.)

At any rate, I started going to sings last week (every Tuesday for two hours), and I just got back from my second. I love pretty much everything about it, but one thing I particularly appreciate is how many of the songs relate to  . . . death.

Yeah. Like that.

When all of the DEATH! DEATH! lyrics come up, we do tend to joke about it . . . “Ohh, another gloomy one!”

I love it.

If you know me, you know that I think about death all the time. I’m with folks at or near their last breath. I help wash the dead and close their eyes. I sit with the dying and listen to their rattling breath. Most modern Americans . . . don’t. Don’t think about it, don’t touch it, don’t go near it. Once in nursing school, of all places you’d think people might think about death, I muttered to the person sitting next to me, “Makes you think about your own mortality, doesn’t it?” she gave a sort of blank stare, and said, “No, not really . . . my parents’ mortality, maybe.” Really? Really. So outside of work, singing Sacred Harp is the only time I get to process death with a community. 

Today I was singing these old hymns, and I suddenly thought , “Hey. My constant thoughts about death aren’t weird. They were normal two hundred years ago. Everyone then had the same desperate need to process death that I feel now. Hence all these hymns! It’s just that we’re so insulated from death that we think contemplating it is morbid, think we don’t need to contemplate it at all.”

What else did we lose when we lost the constant awareness of death?

Sunday Poetry: A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, 
Mark’d how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, 
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.


And you O my soul where you stand, 
Surrounded, detatched, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them. 
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, 
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

—Walt Whitman