This will be a personal volume, for beyond all my study it was the life and death of a person that brought this book together for me. His name was Jim Campbell. Because I knew Jim, I had a new way of looking at Jesus and new eyes to begin to see the meaning of resurrection. To share with my readers my understanding of the Easter Moment demands that I also share the story of Jim Campbell.
I have been a privileged man, privileged to know and to share life with a significant number of people. I mean nothing superficial by that statement, for to know another, to share life with another, is a profound, a rare, and an expanding experience. Most of us spend our lives erecting security systems that keep anyone from knowing our deepest thoughts, our innermost being. The mystery of our own personhood is for many, perhaps for most, locked forever in secret chambers and frequently hidden even from ourselves.
Our generation has witnessed an explosion of consciousness that probes the inner self. Depth psychologyexplores territory that few even a hundred years ago could have imagined. Yoga, meditation, group therapy, and even the use of hallucinogenic drugs find much of their appeal in their promise to introduce one to oneself. People have felt the need of these aids because without them few people can risk exposing themselves to another person. I suppose we all fear that if anyone gets to know us as well as we know ourselves, they might judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves. Self-negativity is an enormously powerful force at work in the human psyche.
But when you allow another to enter your life, to know your deepest self, to share that personal mystery, even to accept that darker side of your existence, it is a powerful, a moving, and a life-changing moment. We yearn for this depth of community with another even though we fear it.
The deepest joy of being an ordained minister for me has been those relationships where I was privileged to get beneath the protective barriers, to meet the real person who lives underneath those barriers, to experience a depth of life that I think is rare, to perceive a quality of life that few ever know. The rarest of all such relationships has come in my ministry to the dying. The one relationship that I treasure above all else and from which I learned the most about life and death and life beyond death was with Jim Campbell, a particular dying person. I can honestly say that I met this man more deeply than I have ever met another human being. He and his life illumined the subject of this book very specifically.
In the summer of 1975 I vacationed with my family on the exquisite Outer Banks of North Carolina. Returning to my parish the last of August, I wentthrough a list of routine notices entitled “while you were away,” which had been prepared for me by my administrative assistant. They were designed to bring to my attention quickly anything that I needed to know or that I needed to follow up. In the midst of the list I read “Jim Campbell went to the hospital to check some swelling in his feet. They think it is an allergic reaction to a fertilizer he has been using on his roses.” I called Jim at home to check. He repeated the remark about the allergy, but there was a tone about his voice that belied the confidence his words were trying to convey. I asked if I could come over that evening. He said, “Fine,” and at 8:00 P.M. I arrived at his house.
Jim Campbell was an anesthesiologist in Richmond, Virginia. He had been confirmed in my parish about a year before. His wife, Ruth, who was a pediatrician, had long been a member, as were their son, John, and their daughter, Elizabeth, who were eleven and eight years of age, respectively. Jim was forty-four, a man of many interests: music, literature, genealogy, and roses among them. He had a deceptive shyness about him that was winsome. He had countless friends.
Jim had been president of his medical school class at the Medical College of Virginia. He had not gone directly to medical school after college and consequently was a bit older than his classmates. This was a crucial fact in his life, for he met his wife, Ruth, while in medical school. She was one of his professors. They had done quite well, and both Jim and Ruth were well respected professionally. The arrival of their children required Ruth to curtail her practice, but Jim’s career soared. This was an attractive, successful family much admired, perhaps even envied, by those who knew them. My relationship with them at that moment wascordial, friendly, but rather superficial. I had, for example, never been in their house before that evening.
Ruth met me at the door and ushered me to an upstairs sitting room where Jim, clad in pajamas and a robe, was sitting. There was an anxiety in Ruth’s face that belied the cavalier quality of her words. She left Jim and me alone, and we had the first significant conversation of our lives. Jim was clinging to the possibility that his body was having a severe allergic reaction, but he said there were other more devastating possibilities, the worst of which was an unusual kind of leukemia. The blood work at the hospital had revealed rather strange data that did not fit into recognizable categories, but it was ominous.
Jim’s physicians were also his friends and colleagues, and it was clearly difficult for them to separate their emotions from their practice of medicine. Doctors often seem to be strangely incapable of dealing with mortality, and this was clearly heightened when the patient was their colleague. They decided that Jim should go to Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, for a thorough and objective workup. That maneuver proved to be a smokescreen to cover the fact that none of them could bring themselves to tell Jim what all of them, including Jim himself, knew. I asked Jim if I might go to Duke with him. It was a premature request that was not appropriate to the relationship we had at that moment. He declined my offer, but he did know I was willing to stay with him no matter what the diagnosis might indicate.
I stayed about two hours that first evening. I got him to explain all the options from the best to the worst. He did so with clinical skill and objectivity. When the most dreaded possibility was discussed, my medical knowledge was enhanced, and my insight into the nature of this remarkable man was heightened. When that evening was over, he and I both knew what the diagnosis was, and we also knew that we would be able to talk about it, live with it, and share it. For Jim, having watched in loneliness as his medical friends could not enter this experience with him, there was in our meeting that evening the promise of community that would dramatically shape both of our lives.
Jim and Ruth went to Durham the next day prepared to stay three or four days for an exhaustive medical workup and a firm diagnosis. They returned in one day. The Duke doctors did a bone marrow scan and a bloodsmear, which, coupled with the test results he brought with him, were considered quite sufficient for a full diagnosis. They announced the name that could only have been heard as a death sentence: acute myelomonoblastic leukemia. Cure or even remission of this disease is practically unknown.2 The treatment is almost as bad as the disease. Many victims of this disease elect to die quickly rather than to struggle with the side effects of the various therapies available, none of which, either singly or in combination, could prolong life beyond a year. But resignation might be easier for some than for this man who was young, vibrant, a happy husband, a needed and loving father, and at the very height of his career capabilities.
I called Jim in Durham shortly after he had received the word. He told me the news with a calm voice. We agreed to meet the next night when he returned to Richmond.
That visit also lasted about two hours. It had elements of all of the stages Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggests that dying people go through: rejection, fighting, resignation, denying, hoping, grieving. Jim recapitulated all of these emotions. The diagnosis removed all pretense from our relationship. All of the superficialities were swept aside.
We shared the images we both had of each other from the time we first met, and we laughed about them. We talked about the effects his illness would have on his wife, the children, and his mother. We talked about the impact the treatment would have on him as a person. Some of the side effects were dreadful: loss of hair, violent nausea, impotence, lesions of the mouth. Conversation flowed easily. It set the tone for almost a year that we were to know each other before his death.
As those days went by, revelation followed revelation. Jim shared with me difficult moments from his childhood, his adolescence. Painful experiences that he had tried to forget were called up, relived, perhaps healed. I, in turn, was freed to open my hurtful moments to him. The joys, the successes of both our lives were also shared. There was no sense of embarrassment, for we were free of that human need to inflate the ego.
Jim did not realize it for a while, but he would never practice medicine again in his life. Never did he get well enough to work a full day, and the insurance coverage that he had to carry made part-time work economically unfeasible. When that did dawn on him, it was a foretaste of the death experience itself; for far more than any of us realizes, we receive a great measure of our sense of self-worth from our productive labor. In the practice of medicine, the line between one’s personal self and one’s professional medical selfis always blurred. Jim had immense manual dexterity that found outlets in playing the piano and, interestingly enough, in his ability to type. This latter skill provided the means whereby our lives, his and mine, became even more involved.
Our church was a beehive of activity and consequently was always understaffed. Jim came by often enough to be aware of this and suggested that he might assist in the office. In a few weeks we became the only church I have ever heard of with a physician working as a parish secretary.
Everyone on our staff knew Jim’s story. He was able to discuss it freely. They also came to love this incredible man who could enjoy life so deeply and make them enjoy it on levels they had never before imagined. This was his gift to them.
Jim’s work in the parish office meant that I saw him daily. Frequently we would find moments to talk about life as we had and were experiencing it. On more than one occasion in my counseling ministry, I met a situation where medical expertise was needed. I would ask my counselees if they would be willing to discuss their problem with a doctor on our staff. They always were willing and I would send them in to see Jim. He was a marvelous pastor; not once did they suspect the incomprehensible drama that they were sharing.
At that time there was a gradual decline, periods of hospitalization, and dreadful treatments, but Jim embraced them all and allowed me to share them with him. I in turn invited him into my life, which at that time involved exciting new dimensions. I was participating in a series of medical ethics dialogues with Dr. Daniel Gregory, a professor of internal medicine at the Medical College of Virginia, which were later published as a monograph under the title Life Approaches Death. Jim was my enormously helpful consultant.
I was also being considered for nomination and possible election as bishop coadjutor of Newark, New Jersey, an opportunity about which I was distinctly ambivalent. Everyone else who knew about this related to it out of his or her own internal agenda. Jim seemed free of this. Somehow the certainty of his own death gave him the freedom to be radically objective; thus he helped me sort my feelings and galvanize my decision-making mechanisms.
On March 6, 1976, I was elected to that bishopric; and in many ways from that moment on, both of us knew that we were dying. I was dying to my life in Richmond; he was dying to his life in this world. Certainly his was the more ultimate experience, but suddenly in a very existential way, many of his emotions and realities became real and true for me.
I would be separated forever from that community of people in which I lived and from whom I derived my strength. Every meeting with close friends was laden with the presence and the pain of that separation. I felt guilty about leaving. Some dealt with the impending separation by rejecting me “ahead of time,” sometimes with overt hostility. I began to understand why it is so difficult for so many people to relate openly and honestly to a person who is dying. It is difficult to relate to any separation that hurts. I began to see as never before the guilt, the rejection, the hostility that is part of both death and bereavement. This I shared only with Jim, who could understand and interpret.
In these days he entered my life as deeply as I had entered his. We treasured the time we had together. And we knew a level of life that I at least had never known before. I find words inadequate to describe it, but there was an intensity, a vitality, a transcendence about my relationship with Jim that was unique. In that relationship life expanded, time seemed to be a lost dimension, and God became a reality that was more than a word, more than a power. God was a kind of eternal presence that embraced us both. We explored this with the same openness with which we had explored everything else and again with no sense of embarrassment, no phoniness, no retreats into an unreal piety. We prayed together, but the quality of the life we shared with each other was holier than the words of prayer.
Jim had been relatively active in church. He had been a member of the choir. At this time he wanted to be a lay reader, and I arranged it. In that capacity he read lessons in public worship and administered the wine at Communion services. He was not always steady of either foot or voice. By this time mouth ulcers from his medication were a most unpleasant physical symptom. But he was determined to make this public witness, and he did. Privately, we would sing hymns together. He would play the piano with a lusty beat and sing at the top of his voice. In a very deliberate manner he also worked out every detail of his funeral service.
As April and May came, Jim’s deterioration became more obvious. His hospital stays were longer, his days without overpowering medication were fewer. The process of separation was occurring. Our relationship began to shift. Jim felt freer to be dependent. Sometimes our visits were spent in silence. Words seemed not to matter. Sometimes his mind was affected, andhe talked of fantasies and fears. At one point he became convinced that his wife, Ruth, was dying, but that soon passed.
For the last month of his life, it was as if Jim had already died. He was beyond pain, beyond most of his relationships, beyond this world. Somehow I was able to be there with him. So deeply had our lives touched the source of life in the other that we escaped most of the limitations of human existence. Jim was alive, full, free, whole even as he was dying, and I was more alive than ever before because of his gifts to me. I had long suspected that at the heart of each human life there is a vitality, a power, a quality of life that seldom emerges into our consciousness, so broken and fragmented and insecure is human life. But in this dying man, somehow by the grace of God, I had been allowed to enter that vibrant core and to share it.
What is there, I am convinced, is a transcendent presence that participates in all that we mean by the words God and heaven. One does not have to be dying to risk letting this power be known, but human beings instinctively resist the entrance of another human life into the holiest part of their being. (To share our souls might be the way traditional pious language would put it.) And because we are so afraid, we seldom really live or love or risk or dare to be. A dying man invited me beyond his security shell and allowed me to invite him beyond my security shell; and the deeper we dared to live in that relationship, the more I knew what transcendence meant, the more certain I was that God was real and that there was life beyond this life.
I think I have glimpsed it. I believe I have touched it. I am even convinced I have entered it. It is not separate from this life. It is rather the unexplored, even denied, inner core of this life. If one could be free of the brokenness of humanity, the distortions of human insecurity, then this power could be seen in that person in a startling new way. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this might be a new way to look at that life I call Lord and Christ, that being who in some way broke every human barrier, including the barrier of death.
Two or three days before my last service at St. Paul’s Church, I saw Jim in the hospital for the last time. He was not conscious. I sat quietly in his room for a few minutes, then I talked to him. It was a monologue. Basically, I thanked him for his ministry to me, for allowing me to see things I had never seen before and to understand truths I had never understood before. Then I prayed, blessed him, and left.
On Sunday, May 30, 1976, I held my last Sunday service as rector of St. Paul’s Church. The organist played and the choir sang as the benediction hymn the Jewish round, “Sholom Chaverim” (“Go in Peace, Dear Friend”). A chapter of my life was closing. It would never be the same.
On Tuesday, June 1, the day my resignation became effective, Jim Campbell died. We held his funeral on Thursday, June 3. It was my last official act as rector of that parish. For the benediction hymn the organist played and the choir sang “Sholom Chaverim.” A chapter in his life was closing. It would never be the same.
There is something beyond time and space. There is life beyond every human limitation of life, even the limitation of death. The way one discovers that is not by escaping life, but rather by daring to live life, by scaling its heights, exploring its depths, facing its risks, penetrating its barriers. I did that with Jim Campbell; and because I did, I will never be the same, and death will never be ultimate to me again. Finally, in my relationship with Jim Campbell I found a clue that enabled me to look again at the biblical drama of Easter and to see things I had never seen before. Suddenly all of my study and my research came together in a new way.