The Worst That Could Happen

I was in Seminary in Berkeley when I discovered a psychiatrist named Fritz Kunkel. He practiced in Los Angeles. When he died his wife donated his papers to the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopal) in Berkeley. I began a dissertation on his life and thought and received permission to read everything---letters, lectures and an unfinished book. I spent several months snooping through his stuff.

I ran across a lecture he gave in Chicago in the early 50’s. I don’t remember anything in it except one sentence written sideways in the margin in pencil. It was so smeared I could hardly make it out.

It said,” The greatest contribution a human being can make to life is through what’s wrong with him.”

I read it again, “The greatest contribution…through what’s wrong with us.”

I thought about it for days. Of course! What do we know more intimately than what is wrong with us? It haunts our dreams. It stares back at us when we look in the mirror. We can’t outrun it.

I am thinking of a recovering alcoholic in Austin who is a true “man of the cloth.” His cloth is a towel. He wipes faces, floors and beds of alcoholics when they come in sick. He is a high school teacher.

I am thinking of a woman who lost her baby sister in a fire. She was just a girl herself when it happened. She sometimes blames herself. She brings immeasurable depth of understanding and generous compassion to any situation. She is a stockbroker.

I was in a hospital room with a cancer patient doing my best in the middle of bottomless sadness. Suddenly the door opened and a cancer survivor came into the room bringing light and hope. She is a florist.

I’ve seen it in divorce, infertility, SIDS, abortion, drug addiction, death of a partner, job termination, chronic pain, bankruptcy, rape, crime…you name it.

It is just like God, isn’t it; to use the worst thing that has happened to us, the humiliating thing, the wrong thing, the thing we thought would kill us, to help in the healing of another.