Monday Morning Musing: Poured Out

In four months it will be Christmas Day.  In a few days it will be three months since Bruce died.  Time has taken on an almost slippery quality, unable to be depended on to act in predictable ways. 

Yesterday the congregation I serve held a blood drive to honor and remember Bruce.  They began planning it while he was still in the hospital, receiving unit after unit of blood and unit after unit of plasma.  I had every intention of being one of the donors yesterday, but as the event approached I began to realize that some of the trauma from those terrible days is lodged in the images and sounds associated with blood.  And as I worked through that I realized that not only was this still deeply embedded, but that it lives somewhere in my mind and memory as something of a liturgy or a litany. 

Each time Bruce received blood, two nurses had to be present. 

The litany began with the reading of his armband: 

Elbert Bruce Hutson.  Patient number xxxxx.  Birthdate read aloud as if one of a bookend. 

And the identical response: 

Elbert Bruce Hutson.  Patient number xxxxx.  Birthdate repeated again. 

Then the liturgy moved to the reading of the particularities of the blood. 

Blood is A+. Patient is O+.  Blood expires xx/xx/xxxx. 

And the response. 

Blood is A+. Patient is O+.  Blood expires xx/xx/xxxx. 

And then they would hang the bag, almost ceremonially.  And I would scan the heart shaped tag that allowed me to send an anonymous message of thanks to the donor.  Finally, I would pray, to conclude the rite.  In thanksgiving.  For healing. With rage.  In despair.  For those cells to go in my Beloved’s body and bring life.  Amen.

The Christian tradition is filled with imagery and story and songs of blood. 

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.

There is power, power, wonder working power in the blood of the lamb.

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins.  (What?????)

Each and every week I hold up a chalice and say that the blood of Christ is a new covenant and then one by one I remind these dear people that the blood of Christ has been poured

out for them.  Then I pronounce a blessing on them, not as a wish, but as the punctuation of what is already true, that the body and blood of Jesus will be a blessing to them and will keep them wrapped in grace until we meet at that table again.

Blood literally gives life and in the case of my beloved, his blood took his away.  His blood that just went awry in an unimaginable and unpredictable mutation.  His oncology team used to refer to “immature blood cells” and I would imagine they looked like Middle School Boys. 

Ultimately, I could not donate blood yesterday.  I knew that my spirit and my mind were still processing the associated trauma.  A retired therapist in the congregation said “Pastor, if you’d even tried to go in there, I would have stopped you.  You aren’t ready.”  And she’s right.  I’m not.  But some day I will be and I hope that my blood will be the sacrifice on the altar of some hospital room where someone is awaiting some sacrament of hope and healing and wholeness.  And perhaps my response can then be:  Alleluia.