Holy Week – Holy Ground – Holy Now
By Dr. Len Delony
April 7, 2022
Last month, I spent a full week at my “alma mater” St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I know I’ve mentioned St Jude many times before, but the heart of my calling is in that Holy Ground and my experiences of learning to prayerfully breathe through fear, pain, and the nearness of death.
It has been several years since I was there as part of their Long-Term Follow-Up research on survivors of childhood cancer. I’m now celebrating my 51st year since being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and am among the longest survivors in their 60-year history. Prayerfully remembering my soul story helps me to be more deeply grounded in gratitude, and know that life is a sacred gift.
Everywhere I went, I experienced connections with old and new patients, parents, staff, and visitors (including First Lady Jill Biden and Marlo Thomas.) In countless ways, we were immersed in powerful soul stories of brokenness and of being transformed with new hope, compassion, encouragement, and gratitude. Along the way, I have discovered and rediscovered within myself and with others, awareness of this deeper reality that starts in grace. It is a wiser and truer way that helps us courageously (that is, living from an open heart) let go of our fearful reactions. In that practice of letting go, we become more aware of God’s loving and compassionate Presence. And in that trusting awareness of God’s Presence, our relationship with Jesus deepens and we can hear more clearly God’s invitation for us to make compassionate, courageous, and creative responses in the midst of painful challenges.
As we let our ego fade away, (in a sense, die to the mind of Christ), we discover a new way of healing and resurrection. It was such a blessing to connect with so many people at St Jude’s in such a heartfelt, soulful community. It is truly Holy Ground. But when I say St Jude is Holy Ground, I don’t mean that to exclude the possibility that Holy Ground is everywhere. Paradoxically, though it can’t happen without the power of God’s loving grace, Holy Places and Holy Times largely depend on our inner awareness of God’s loving compassion. And our faithful response to God’s call can happen anytime and anywhere. Potentially, we realize that everything is Holy.
When we say this is Holy Week, we don’t mean to imply that every moment is not potentially Kairos or a Holy Moment. It’s all about being immersed in grace and the power of compassion throughout the year. We need to experience and be reminded over and again, that our ego must let go of control to allow our hearts to be broken open. (Lent is all about letting go fo our ego’s desires, and opening ourselves to the deeper desires of the soul we come to know through God’s love.) Through grace, we can awaken to the power of God’s presence in the Holy Spirit. Throughout our lives, pain and vulnerability, whenever and wherever suffering happens, is potentially an opening to the miraculous power of God’s Presence and loving compassion.
So now, as we move again through Holy Week, the most important days of our Christian calendar, we are called to join together to be immersed in Jesus’ soul stories and remember we are the Body of Christ. Every Holy Week and each Holy Day, we need to rediscover new spiritual practices and new ways our lifelong soul story shapes who we are at our deepest level… for the transformation of the world.
Here is a gentle, yet powerful song by Peter Mayer – “Holy Now.”
The Awakening of Zen-Len
Anyone who saw Len Delony sprawled out on the ground that day had to worry. The boy had been going through an awful lot — a cancer ordeal that rendered him frail and homebound — and now, there he lay, as motionless as a corpse. Had he fainted? A neighbor walked over to check.
“Are you OK?” the elderly man asked.
As it turned out, Delony was more than OK. He was in thrall of a life-altering experience.
Too weak to do much else, the boy had plopped down in his backyard, stared up at the cerulean sky and, for the first time in his 13 years, fully taken in the sensory wonders of nature. He savored the sun’s warmth and the luxuriant feel of the grass. He studied the distinctive calls of cardinals, chickadees and mockingbirds in the trees overhead. “I was just soaking up all of the life around me,” he would later say.
On that fecund spring day in 1971 a discovery took root, one that has defined and guided Delony ever since. Impelled by his cancer suffering, the youngster had happened onto something known today as “mindfulness” — a relaxed, meditative awareness of the moment. He referred to it as simply “the power of being present to what is.”
No matter the name, the practice became central to Delony’s healing, helping sustain him through more than five years of treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for Hodgkin lymphoma, including a relapse and complications.
It also has driven his career over the decades counseling addicts, cancer patients and people with psychological disorders. As a hospital chaplain and Methodist minister, Delony has led people to pay attention to their breathing and thoughts, helping them tamp down anxiety, summon inner strength and become more open to healing.
Nearly 50 years after that revelatory day in his backyard — the time he says he realized he was “part of something bigger” than himself or his cancer — a 62-year-old Delony continues to explore mindfulness. It’s not lost on him that he was ahead of his time in embracing the practice, even if he didn’t know the name for it.
“Before it was called that…,” he said, “I was experiencing it.”
Ominous discovery
Lawson Leonard “Len” Delony III never harbored any particular apprehension about the number 13. He had a favorite fishing lure called Lucky 13 and used it to catch his biggest bass ever.
However, at 13 years of age, on November 13, 1970 — Friday the 13th, as a matter of fact — Delony came home from football practice and glanced at a mirror. He saw a lump on his neck.
Within a week, Delony was a patient at St. Jude, located in Memphis, 135 miles east of his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer originating in white blood cells known as lymphocytes.
Surgery, intense radiation and chemotherapy followed. Decades later, he distinctly recalls how “horrible” one particular chemotherapy drug made him feel. How it took an hour and a half to swallow three pills.
Delony’s weight plummeted from 115 to about 77 pounds, leaving him too weak to go to school.
It seemed a particularly cruel burden for a kid who had been so active, who loved to explore the woods behind his house and who was, as he says, “quite good” at sports.
His dad told him, however, the discovery of the lump on the 13th had been lucky. It allowed for early treatment.
Delony eventually went into remission, only to suffer a relapse two years later, when he was in ninth grade. He endured an even more aggressive chemotherapy regimen. He experienced additional complications throughout high school, first in the form of severe shingles, and later a bout of encephalitis.
He eventually emerged from his medical problems scarred but lucky in many ways. He married his college sweetheart, entered the ministry and, along with wife Rebekah, began raising two daughters.
As he recalled in a blog post, however, his cancer experience was “a rough road at times.”
A Calming Presence
Delony has earned a memorable nickname through his years of work as a chaplain and minister.
“We call him Zen Len,” said Rhonna Oriti, nursing and unit manager at the Fort Worth hospice house where Delony is a chaplain. “There’s just a peace and a calmness about him.”
Oriti sees Delony as uniquely qualified for the “very chaotic, very emotionally charged” challenge of dealing with the terminally ill and their families in hospice care. “He, with his personal experience, with his battle, is able to really help the patients and the staff on a whole different level …”
Delony drew on his experiences as an adolescent cancer patient while writing his doctor of ministry project, which focused on mindfulness, healing stories and relaxation response. Over the years, he also explored the work of theologians and writers like the late Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who helped revive the early tradition of contemplative Christianity.
“Len’s a deep soul,” said the Rev. Dr. Mitzi Ellington, chaplain manager at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Alliance.
“He was always inviting us to take a contemplative approach to our care, to listen to our own souls so we could be present to allow God to do the healing.”
Delony’s painful experience with a deadly disease left him with an “inner peace” about his own life, said the Rev. Linda McDermott, a longtime friend who is godmother to his daughters. “And I think he tries to bring that to other people.”
McDermott recounts an anecdote that reflects the high regard in which people hold Delony. Her son, then a 17-year-old, was driving one day and grew frustrated by the slow speed of the middle-aged motorist in front of him. When the opportunity finally came to pass the plodding car, the teenager turned and was about to make a hand gesture toward the other driver before realizing it was Delony.
The teen wore a regretful look when he got home. “I feel so bad,” he told his mom. “I just about flipped off Jesus.”
Meeting patients 'where they are'
The terminally ill woman just wanted to dance.
At the Bluebonnet Retreat, a North Texas camp for adults with cancer, Delony, along with teams of specialists, has helped scores of patients cope with their illness.
One woman in particular stands out in his memory. A recovering alcoholic, she suffered from pancreatic cancer and had just weeks to live.
At the retreat, the woman wanted to dance, so she and Delony swayed to the song “Crazy” by Patsy Cline.
A month or so later, Delony was summoned to her hospital room, where she lay near death. The woman’s father told him she might pass away at any moment, but the patient strongly disagreed.
“I’m not ready to go,” she insisted. “I want to dance — let’s move the furniture.”
And so they did. A bit awkwardly at first, friends, family and visitors in the room cleared some space. Delony and the patient then danced one last time, with others joining in.
“It was a real sense of celebrating her life,” he recalled.
The episode, if nothing else, illustrated Delony’s inclination to “meet people where they are,” as he calls it, and guide them on their healing process.
“Healing is not making people live longer,” he said. “Healing is in the relationships that people have – with the creator, in a spiritual sense – and with family.”
A lasting legacy
A half-century removed from his cancer ordeal, Delony still can trace the scars it left on his skin — the wounds from the surgical incisions, the welts from the shingles.
His reaction to seeing the scars, however, is one of mostly gratitude, he said. Gratitude for the successful therapy he received. Gratitude for the compassion shown to him. Gratitude for St. Jude.
“The depth of hope, care and compassion here is palpable,” he wrote following a 2018 visit to the hospital. He calls St. Jude the place where his call to the ministry began. “Speaking as an alumnus who started my journey here over 45 years ago, this place is Holy Ground.”
As Delony sees it, gratitude is a vitally important path to healing, a way for the mind to, in computer language, “do a reboot, sort of start fresh in situations.”
He’s encouraged by the wide acceptance now given to mindfulness. Delony describes his conversion to mindfulness as “a single moment and an ongoing discovery.”
And it all began when a sickly youngster sank down in the grass and looked anew at the world around him.
Anyone who saw Len Delony sprawled out on the ground that day had to worry. The boy had been going through an awful lot — a cancer ordeal that rendered him frail and homebound — and now, there he lay, as motionless as a corpse. Had he fainted? A neighbor walked over to check.
“Are you OK?” the elderly man asked.
As it turned out, Delony was more than OK. He was in thrall of a life-altering experience.
Too weak to do much else, the boy had plopped down in his backyard, stared up at the cerulean sky and, for the first time in his 13 years, fully taken in the sensory wonders of nature. He savored the sun’s warmth and the luxuriant feel of the grass. He studied the distinctive calls of cardinals, chickadees and mockingbirds in the trees overhead. “I was just soaking up all of the life around me,” he would later say.
On that fecund spring day in 1971 a discovery took root, one that has defined and guided Delony ever since. Impelled by his cancer suffering, the youngster had happened onto something known today as “mindfulness” — a relaxed, meditative awareness of the moment. He referred to it as simply “the power of being present to what is.”
No matter the name, the practice became central to Delony’s healing, helping sustain him through more than five years of treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for Hodgkin lymphoma, including a relapse and complications.
It also has driven his career over the decades counseling addicts, cancer patients and people with psychological disorders. As a hospital chaplain and Methodist minister, Delony has led people to pay attention to their breathing and thoughts, helping them tamp down anxiety, summon inner strength and become more open to healing.
Nearly 50 years after that revelatory day in his backyard — the time he says he realized he was “part of something bigger” than himself or his cancer — a 62-year-old Delony continues to explore mindfulness. It’s not lost on him that he was ahead of his time in embracing the practice, even if he didn’t know the name for it.
“Before it was called that…,” he said, “I was experiencing it.”
Ominous discovery
Lawson Leonard “Len” Delony III never harbored any particular apprehension about the number 13. He had a favorite fishing lure called Lucky 13 and used it to catch his biggest bass ever.
However, at 13 years of age, on November 13, 1970 — Friday the 13th, as a matter of fact — Delony came home from football practice and glanced at a mirror. He saw a lump on his neck.
Within a week, Delony was a patient at St. Jude, located in Memphis, 135 miles east of his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer originating in white blood cells known as lymphocytes.
Surgery, intense radiation and chemotherapy followed. Decades later, he distinctly recalls how “horrible” one particular chemotherapy drug made him feel. How it took an hour and a half to swallow three pills.
Delony’s weight plummeted from 115 to about 77 pounds, leaving him too weak to go to school.
It seemed a particularly cruel burden for a kid who had been so active, who loved to explore the woods behind his house and who was, as he says, “quite good” at sports.
His dad told him, however, the discovery of the lump on the 13th had been lucky. It allowed for early treatment.
Delony eventually went into remission, only to suffer a relapse two years later, when he was in ninth grade. He endured an even more aggressive chemotherapy regimen. He experienced additional complications throughout high school, first in the form of severe shingles, and later a bout of encephalitis.
He eventually emerged from his medical problems scarred but lucky in many ways. He married his college sweetheart, entered the ministry and, along with wife Rebekah, began raising two daughters.
As he recalled in a blog post, however, his cancer experience was “a rough road at times.”
A Calming Presence
Delony has earned a memorable nickname through his years of work as a chaplain and minister.
“We call him Zen Len,” said Rhonna Oriti, nursing and unit manager at the Fort Worth hospice house where Delony is a chaplain. “There’s just a peace and a calmness about him.”
Oriti sees Delony as uniquely qualified for the “very chaotic, very emotionally charged” challenge of dealing with the terminally ill and their families in hospice care. “He, with his personal experience, with his battle, is able to really help the patients and the staff on a whole different level …”
Delony drew on his experiences as an adolescent cancer patient while writing his doctor of ministry project, which focused on mindfulness, healing stories and relaxation response. Over the years, he also explored the work of theologians and writers like the late Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who helped revive the early tradition of contemplative Christianity.
“Len’s a deep soul,” said the Rev. Dr. Mitzi Ellington, chaplain manager at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Alliance.
“He was always inviting us to take a contemplative approach to our care, to listen to our own souls so we could be present to allow God to do the healing.”
Delony’s painful experience with a deadly disease left him with an “inner peace” about his own life, said the Rev. Linda McDermott, a longtime friend who is godmother to his daughters. “And I think he tries to bring that to other people.”
McDermott recounts an anecdote that reflects the high regard in which people hold Delony. Her son, then a 17-year-old, was driving one day and grew frustrated by the slow speed of the middle-aged motorist in front of him. When the opportunity finally came to pass the plodding car, the teenager turned and was about to make a hand gesture toward the other driver before realizing it was Delony.
The teen wore a regretful look when he got home. “I feel so bad,” he told his mom. “I just about flipped off Jesus.”
Meeting patients 'where they are'
The terminally ill woman just wanted to dance.
At the Bluebonnet Retreat, a North Texas camp for adults with cancer, Delony, along with teams of specialists, has helped scores of patients cope with their illness.
One woman in particular stands out in his memory. A recovering alcoholic, she suffered from pancreatic cancer and had just weeks to live.
At the retreat, the woman wanted to dance, so she and Delony swayed to the song “Crazy” by Patsy Cline.
A month or so later, Delony was summoned to her hospital room, where she lay near death. The woman’s father told him she might pass away at any moment, but the patient strongly disagreed.
“I’m not ready to go,” she insisted. “I want to dance — let’s move the furniture.”
And so they did. A bit awkwardly at first, friends, family and visitors in the room cleared some space. Delony and the patient then danced one last time, with others joining in.
“It was a real sense of celebrating her life,” he recalled.
The episode, if nothing else, illustrated Delony’s inclination to “meet people where they are,” as he calls it, and guide them on their healing process.
“Healing is not making people live longer,” he said. “Healing is in the relationships that people have – with the creator, in a spiritual sense – and with family.”
A lasting legacy
A half-century removed from his cancer ordeal, Delony still can trace the scars it left on his skin — the wounds from the surgical incisions, the welts from the shingles.
His reaction to seeing the scars, however, is one of mostly gratitude, he said. Gratitude for the successful therapy he received. Gratitude for the compassion shown to him. Gratitude for St. Jude.
“The depth of hope, care and compassion here is palpable,” he wrote following a 2018 visit to the hospital. He calls St. Jude the place where his call to the ministry began. “Speaking as an alumnus who started my journey here over 45 years ago, this place is Holy Ground.”
As Delony sees it, gratitude is a vitally important path to healing, a way for the mind to, in computer language, “do a reboot, sort of start fresh in situations.”
He’s encouraged by the wide acceptance now given to mindfulness. Delony describes his conversion to mindfulness as “a single moment and an ongoing discovery.”
And it all began when a sickly youngster sank down in the grass and looked anew at the world around him.
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A Good Death
“Some soon day my dancing here will end”
Journal Entry in CaringBridge
by Rebekah Miles Delony, March 15, 2024
Len has had a wonderful time at the beach this week. Yesterday morning we even went parasailing which, along with the beach and family time, was on Len’s bucket list. In the afternoon, he and I took a walk along the beach with Len using just his cane and not the beach wheelchair, which pleased him. (You can see pictures of these various activities.) We talked with a Dallas pastor and family while on our walk – Amos and Sarah Disasa. Before we went in for Len’s later afternoon nap, he decided he wanted to go out in the water for the first - and last - time. In the water he fell to his knees and reached out his hand to me. I ran to him. Len had made friends of a few of the young men on the beach, and several of them rushed over to help me get him out of the water. The kids ran down to be with us. We thanked Len and told him that we loved him. The life guards and paramedics came, and they worked on him a while, but he was already gone. (Len had a DNR, but I didn’t have it with me on the beach.) Rev. Disasa came over and stayed with us and prayed with Len and the kids and me.
*
The afternoon before Len’s death (the 13th), I found him crying in our bedroom as he listened to this beautiful song written by his friends Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer. He played this a lot in his last two days, and on his last night with us, he had us all sit and listen to the song – The Music Will Play On. (His last text to our family group chat was a link to the song with the message “Love each and every one of you. ”) He was already planning the next CaringBridge post and had asked me to share the lyrics with you and a link to the YouTube video. Here it is from Len to all of you - The Music Will Play On.
*
The afternoon before Len’s death (the 13th), I found him crying in our bedroom as he listened to this beautiful song written by his friends Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer. He played this a lot in his last two days, and on his last night with us, he had us all sit and listen to the song – The Music Will Play On. (His last text to our family group chat was a link to the song with the message “Love each and every one of you. ”) He was already planning the next CaringBridge post and had asked me to share the lyrics with you and a link to the YouTube video. Here it is from Len to all of you - The Music Will Play On.
Love and Cancer
A Reflection by Jay McDaniel
Ideally, we would rise to the occasion and transform the adversity into an opportunity for greater happiness. We would use the adversity to deepen our own wisdom and compassion, and transform it into something we can embrace. We would chew it up, swallow, and digest it, and be closer to enlightenment as a result. That's the ideal, as the Tibetans say: transform adversity into spiritual growth.
— B. Alan Wallace in Boundless Heart
Yes, some adversity can be transformed into spiritual growth and greater happiness, but there are limits. Let's not pretend that all of life is the unfolding of a heavenly script known by God. Or that all things that happen are meant to be because of karma or fate. No need to sugarcoat the world. The world offers love and beauty, to be sure, but also sadness and violence. Some of the sadness and violence are not meant to be.
Let's try out instead the idea, advocated by open and relational theologians, that there really is a source of good at work in the universe, all-influential but never in a dominating way, and that the very nature of this God is Love. Let us acknowledge that just as the God has power, so the world has power.
By the power of the world I have in mind the agency of human beings, of course, but also the agency of other animals, living cells, and the microscopic events within the depths of atoms. I have in mind the agency of the kindly grandmother and the playful puppy, but also that of the deadly virus and the ferocious hurricane.
Sometimes worldly power produces great good: love and beauty, for example. It is not evil. But sometimes it produces great tragedy, including terrible suffering for which no instrumental good can compensate. Witness terrible forms of cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Witness also murder and rape, genocide and abuse. The power of the world unfolds as good and evil, love and hatred, peace and violence, justice and injustice, sadness and beauty, tenderness and tragedy.
In light of tragedy, what is the good news? I think it is threefold:
The point here is that God is not in the business of causing suffering or even knowing it in advance. The world has its own power and this power includes the power of cancer cells. God is in the business of offering fresh possibilities for growth, whatever happens, in this life and in whatever continuing journey comes later. The awakening of my former student and friend, Len Delony, provides an example of this transformation on earth as it is in heaven. May we, too, awaken in just the ways he has awakened.
- Jay McDaniel, March 9, 2021
Let's try out instead the idea, advocated by open and relational theologians, that there really is a source of good at work in the universe, all-influential but never in a dominating way, and that the very nature of this God is Love. Let us acknowledge that just as the God has power, so the world has power.
By the power of the world I have in mind the agency of human beings, of course, but also the agency of other animals, living cells, and the microscopic events within the depths of atoms. I have in mind the agency of the kindly grandmother and the playful puppy, but also that of the deadly virus and the ferocious hurricane.
Sometimes worldly power produces great good: love and beauty, for example. It is not evil. But sometimes it produces great tragedy, including terrible suffering for which no instrumental good can compensate. Witness terrible forms of cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Witness also murder and rape, genocide and abuse. The power of the world unfolds as good and evil, love and hatred, peace and violence, justice and injustice, sadness and beauty, tenderness and tragedy.
In light of tragedy, what is the good news? I think it is threefold:
- Creative transformation happens. Some suffering, some tragedy, is indeed be transformed into personal growth. People actually grow, and for the better. Societies, too, can be creatively transformed. They can become more just, sustainable, and joyful: good for people and good for the earth.
- We are never alone. The Love at the heart of the universe, God, is an eternal companion to all the world's joys and sufferings and is continuously at work in the world as a lure toward creative transformation, individually and socially. God never gives up on us or anybody.
- There is always hope. The companionship and luring power of divine Love may well continue in a continuing journey after death for human beings and other living beings, which means that tragedy,while real, may not have the last word. An ultimate redemption is imaginable and possible, for eacn and all.
The point here is that God is not in the business of causing suffering or even knowing it in advance. The world has its own power and this power includes the power of cancer cells. God is in the business of offering fresh possibilities for growth, whatever happens, in this life and in whatever continuing journey comes later. The awakening of my former student and friend, Len Delony, provides an example of this transformation on earth as it is in heaven. May we, too, awaken in just the ways he has awakened.
- Jay McDaniel, March 9, 2021