On rare occasions you encounter a story, a poem, or a work of art that draws you into depths that you’d forgotten or not seen before. As often the case, that work takes you to places that has everything to do with the artist’s idea…and at the same time seemingly nothing to do with it.
That’s my reaction to a prayer recently shared by the Rev. Dr. Karl Travis, a Texan through and through. It’s titled A Prayer for This Moment, which I’ll share shortly.
First, though, to understand the depth from which this prayer arises, you need to know a bit about Dr. Travis. He was at the height of his career in 2012, in his late 40s, when he began to experience mysterious health issues. For a dozen years, Dr. Travis was senior pastor at the 2,000-member First Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, TX. Somehow he kept life, limb, and sense of humor together until pastoring became impossible, and he resigned in December 2018.
Much earlier, he graduated magna cum laude from Trinity University in San Antonio; studied at San Francisco Theological Seminary; was awarded an Honours B.D. at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland; and later received a doctorate of Humane Letters from Austin College, where he now serves as a trustee. He was a sought-after lecturer and guest preacher.
Dr. Travis ultimately was diagnosed with an unpronounceable progressive pulmonary disorder and severe blood-clotting disease. His family has called in hospice. He describes these troubles this way in a recent blog post titled Meanwhile’s Far from Nothing:
“Remember the café scene in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray says, ‘I wasn’t just blown up yesterday. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned. Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me. Not a dent in the fender.’ He concludes: ‘I am immortal.’
“I sort of understand how he feels! I have survived three pulmonary embolisms, nine deep vein thromboses, eight thrombectomies, 17 days in the catheter lab, and five general surgeries. A third of my left foot has been amputated. Throw in two open heart surgeries and three internal bleeds and you can see why hospice seemed a natural choice. After all, ‘I wasn’t just blown up yesterday!’”
“Entering hospice care meant disconnecting my fancy drugs. Then, stunningly, I dropped 30 pounds in three weeks, stopped taking morphine altogether, and got out of bed. I haven’t felt this good in two years. I should have gone on hospice months ago!
“I’m almost embarrassed to talk to friends anymore. Just how many times must we tell one another goodbye? People have said such kind and gracious things to me, humbling things, remarkable and heartfelt things. Now, after this hospice U-turn, when I talk with them the next time, I will almost overhear their inner dialogue: ‘Well now, this is uncomfortable. Shouldn’t he be dead by now?’”
“I wonder how Lazarus handled the social awkwardness,” Dr. Travis muses.
With his health and breathing issues as a backdrop, and in light of the recent killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd by suffocation and the precipitation of worldwide protests, this is Dr. Travis’s prayer—spiritual, prophetic, unsentimental…
A PRAYER FOR THIS MOMENT
The Spirit cries out…
LET ME BREATHE!
In your streets and into your hearts,
I yearn to blow free.
But you are a stiff-necked people,
kneeling on my neck.
Where injustice stands over the downtrodden,
let me breathe.
When racism blinds you to the experience of others,
let me breathe.
As bigotry finds voice in the high places,
let me breathe.
When avoidance and convenience sanction unanswered wrongs,
let me breathe.
Each time privilege cloaks unseemly truth,
let me breathe.
Every time inhumanity poses as righteousness,
let me breathe.
Let me breathe
from “Stone Mountain of Georgia,”
from “Lookout Mountain of Tennessee,”
from “every hill” and “molehill” and
from every “mountainside.”
Let me breathe in YOU, for I am the Lord God,
and I am choking, panting, gasping to be heard,
in all languages, in all places, for all people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve read and repeated Dr. Travis’s prayer, turning it over in my heart and mind. It’s best read aloud, slowly.
Yes, Dr. Travis’s prayer resounds clearly upon the social fabric of my life and upbringing. I grew up in a small, segregated town in Tennessee. My family was a church-going family, my father a successful business owner. As with many of my friends, I was taught to be polite and deferential to others, especially to those of lesser financial status or of a different skin color. You might call that patronizing. In 1968, I was at Georgia Tech when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and his memorial service subsequently held in Atlanta, where the streets were eerily quiet and empty while I hid in my dorm room.
Yet Dr. Travis’s prayer also echoes deep within other chambers of my heart, mind, and soul, and I’m having difficulty explaining how and why.
The words “crisis,” “fear,” and “oppression” seem to frame a common theme. Whether the issue is racial in nature, or economic, or the loss of loved ones, or unresolvable health issues, oppression is still oppression. And paralyzing fear is still fear.
The spirit of Dr. Travis’s prayer recalls a number of moments during our family’s 17-year odyssey with Alzheimer’s, after my vital 50-year-old wife was diagnosed with this disease.
Here are three specific incidents…
When we got home after hearing the diagnosis (this was in 1997), Martha’s first words to me were, “I do not want to tell anyone! I don’t want to tell our children; I don’t want to tell my parents and brothers; and I certainly don’t want to tell our friends.” That diagnosis hadn’t turned our world upside down; it imploded before us.
As I reflect back, I hear these whispered words, Let me breathe, Carlen, you can’t go this alone.
Another moment, about five years after the diagnosis: I vividly remember that day hearing the “thud” upstairs while I was preparing breakfast. Leaping up the steps I found Martha curled up into a full seizure. I froze. Then I called 911. Rushed to ER, she remained a few days in the hospital for observation, doped up because the nurses knew no other way to deal with Martha’s condition. It was terrible. Even after her doctor placed Martha on an anti-seizure med, she had a second one several months later. This time I decided not to call 911. Instead, I lifted her onto our bed, sitting beside her while quietly repeating the meditative word or “mantra” we’d been taught a few years earlier. As it turned out, Martha rested most of that day and woke up the next morning filled with energy.
Let me breathe, Carlen.
A third scene: A decade into our odyssey Martha moved into the Menorah Manor nursing home. I often found her hunched over in a fetal position, her right arm curled tightly behind her neck, anxious about what I didn’t know. I would sit beside Martha and slip my hand into hers while quietly repeating our mantra. It usually didn’t take long before she relaxed her body, sometimes falling asleep, other times looking at me or out the window. Frequently I felt a presence of peace settle into Martha’s room, the quality of which I have not experienced since.
Let me breathe, this Spirit whispers, let me breathe. Let me breathe through your stubbornness. Let me breathe through your obsessions. Let me breathe through your willful compulsions. Let me breathe through your forgotten prejudices and hurts. Let me heal you, Carlen, let me make you whole.
Do you also care for a loved one with dementia or another disabling disease? Have you lost someone close--a beloved child, a parent, a spouse? Have you lost your job or your savings? Are you overwhelmed by the pandemic? Do you have an incurable disease? Are you the victim of racial oppression, blatant or otherwise? Are we oppressors unaware?
Fear comes in many forms, and it can be oppressive and devastating. If persistent and harsh enough, fear seeks to smother the life out of you.
Let me breathe, Carlen, let me make these fractured memories whole.
There’s something about repeating these words, almost like a mantra, when faced with some oppressive feeling or situation that causes me to relax and to open lost spaces within. Don’t ask me how or why. It just does—not always, but often enough.
Thank you, Rev. Dr. Karl Travis, for sharing your prayer. May you continue to realize this life-giving breath within you as you cope with all that’s raining down on you. Yours is a prayer that flows deep and wide into issues of social justice. Yet it also is a prayer that touches the hidden depths of a person’s emotional injury and pained memories. At least it does mine.
Let me breathe!
Carlen Maddux
carlen@carlenmaddux.com
www.carlenmaddux.com
PS1 Dr. Travis permitted me to share his prayer, and you in turn may share this post with your friends and family. If you’d like to sign up for my blog, there’s no charge; just click here.
PS2 My book, A Path Revealed: How Hope, Love, and Joy Found Us Deep in a Maze Called Alzheimer’s, can be ordered from any bookstore or found on Amazon. I share our family’s 17-year odyssey of living with this disease. My high-energy wife Martha was 50 when diagnosed; I was 52. Our three children were still in high school and college. But Alzheimer’s is not the focus of our story; it’s the context. The focus is the spiritual odyssey that unfolded before us, sometimes in strange and surprising ways, other times in the most ordinary of ways.
