Mr. Smith (whose name was changed for privacy purposes) was wasting away from gastric cancer, but there was one thing that still brought him hope for the future: the thought of getting on a boat and fishing one last time.
As he showed me close to 100 pictures of him holding different fish he had caught and people he had met along the way, he flashed strikingly, beautiful smiles with his decaying teeth. “These are the folks that really get me.”
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He didn’t want to talk about the symptoms that were overtaking his life; it was his desire to return to the water, any body of water, that filled our time together. I asked him questions about how this love had impacted his life, how he saw the world, and how he understood the God with whom his relationship might best be described as complicated.
He shared that throughout his lifetime, he had scraped together the money to get on more boats than he could name. He had gone up and down the entire East Coast, seeking out the best spots to catch his favorite kinds of fish, and yet had often released them at the end of the long days so that others would have a chance to find them, too. This was part of his ethos of generosity, of deep appreciation of God’s creation.
“If I could, I’d want to come back as a whale.”
“Tell me more!”
He was becoming increasingly housebound by his cancer. I wondered aloud if coming back as a whale meant having the freedom to go anywhere.
“Yes! That’s it!”
He had spoken early in the visit when I introduced myself as a spiritual care provider about his “disgusting” experiences in church as a child, a place where he felt that condemnation of people outside the church was one of the main takeaways of each sermon.
“Your religion is full of (it) if it makes you a more judgmental person.”
“I certainly agree with you. What should religion be?”
“It should be a way of learning to love others more. Of becoming a better person. The ones that don’t teach that are bunk. They’re fake.”
“If religion means having a source that helps you love others more, how do you see God?”
“God is love.”
“If God is love, why would God not help you come back as a whale when that’s what you want most? When it’s a way of continuing to do what you have loved most while you’ve been human?”
He paused. “It’ll be nice to be in the waters again.”
Each person is an entire universe. Working with people whose spiritual beliefs don’t always reflect what they were taught in their houses of worship and at the dinner table expands my own little universe. Their understandings of the Holy, of all that is good and beautiful, make my life and my own images of divinity more spacious and colorful. May we all dream as big as the waters Mr. Smith now swims in.