Anchored in Hope

This anchor hope symbol from the 2nd or 3rd century is in the Catacomb Domatilla in Rome,
 which I visited on my pilgrimage there in 2004

In April 2016 my wife, Candy, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Our journey is reshaping our understanding and experience of hope. We have some friends who have told us they are praying God will heal her, a few with categorically assertive assurance that she will be healed. I suppose at one level I do believe God could do that, though that would seem to fly in the face of both medical reality and our previous experience and theological understanding of how God works. The therapy and medications she gets do seem to be slowing progression, though that is very difficult to measure. She is diligent about keeping her brain agile with puzzles, and participating in the Mind Effects program at the Lutheran Home four hours every Thursday. We play Scrabble four to five times a week, and she wins about three-quarters of the time with scores near or over 300. We get wonderful support from our son and his family with whom we share a duplex, and from Spirit of Peace Lutheran Church and Milwaukee Mennonite Church, and some of the connections through the Alzheimer’s Association.

Both the physician who diagnosed her when we lived in Dallas and the one who cares for her here in Milwaukee have encouraged us with a hope that at her age at onset and the pace of decline, she could be fairly functional into her eighties, but nothing can predict a sudden and even precipitously rapid decline. Her father is 91 still living in his own home in Minnesota and has a good but not round-the-clock caregiver as he copes with his own aging challenges. Just recently his long-time dentist moved his wife into residential memory care. This seemed to bring to Candy’s Dad’s the awareness of what we have known and lived with since 2016. When he told me on the phone about his dentist’s wife, he said to me, “I hate to give you bad news, but Candy is not going to get better.”

While we can’t predict the pace of our journey, we are acutely aware of the inexorable path on which Alzheimer’s is taking us. So if we are not hoping she will get better, what does it mean for us to make this journey with hope?

In forty plus years of pastoral ministry, I have stood at many gravesides as the body of a loved one is about to be lowered into the earth and said these classic words, “We commend to almighty God our sister/brother, and we commit her/his body to the ground earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.” Behind those words and the hope they affirm is a mystery far beyond my ability to grasp much less explain. Having attended (sometimes as a hearse or limousine driver) many funerals, I too often cringe at the shallow attempts that seem to me to trivialize both the pain of death and profundity of eternal life. I rebel in anger at the way holding out some sort of “pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by” pseudo-hope has been used as a way of pacifying victims of oppression or discounting the reality of suffering. So far no one has said this to me. “She is or will be so much better off when this life is over and she’s got her mind and body back.” (Or the ubiquitous “She’s in a better place.”) But if they did (even at the end of our journey), I might just snap back with anger.

From very early on, perhaps even late in the first century, Christians have used the anchor as a symbol of hope, taking a cue from Hebrews 6:19. “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” The small ships of ancient times needed a way to weather sudden violent storms. The anchor was used in open water, lowered from the bow of the ship to keep the prow pointing directly into the wind of the storm. That way the ship could ride up and down with the waves without rolling and capsizing. When the anchor was doing its job, it was unseen, deep below the water’s surface, which fits with Romans 8:24. “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?”

The security of the hope anchor keeps us facing directly into the storm. This is not a hope for a happy ending but a hope for authentic joy along the journey. Candy and I recognize, sometime with humor and sometimes with grief, the increasing gaps in her memory. We have relinquished efforts to save up new memories for the future. Rather, we find hope in the sometimes sober joys of the present. Perhaps enforced in a way we wouldn’t have wished for, this journey is instilling in us the hope of living in the sacrament of the present moment, as I have often taught and recommended Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s little book. God meets us in those present joys, and in the laughs and tears of acknowledged holes in her memory. We savor them as they occur, much as enjoying a delicious meal is superior to remembering or anticipating one. And as God meets us, though unseen, we know we are not alone on this journey.

I have long resonated with Thomas Merton’s prayer from Thoughts in Solitude. “I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” Yes, we are facing both known and unknown perils on a trackless journey often in the shadow of death, but our hope is that we are not alone. It is not as though God is admonishing us, “Hang in there. A glorious reward awaits.” No, with the anchor of hope unseen, keeping us pointed straight into the storm, we are not alone. God is on the journey, in the perils, with us.