I take up the subjects of this morning's sermon with great humility.  The specter of Alzheimer's Disease is on our minds at this point in our history.  On the one hand, medical science is extending our life spans; more and more of us will live into our eighties and nineties, and perhaps even beyond.  And yet, Alzheimer's awaits at the end of those longer years.  One of every two people over 85 has Alzheimer's.

I imagine for people who entering their eighties this is a frightening, even terrifying, prospect, life's final lottery.  For many of us, who are younger, Alzheimer's, or some other form of cognitive disorder, enters our lives with the conditions of our parents.

And, our consciousness of this disease, has been quickened by the public witness of former President Ronald Reagan. Diseases and medical conditions in our media saturated culture become identified by the celebrities who have them.  I know that I have been quite affected by his story.  I read a story, you may have seen it in Newsweek, of a writer who came to see President Reagan and they had a brief and pleasant chat in his office.  And near the end of their talk, the former President picked up a small replica of the White House which was on his desk.  He turned it over and over in his hand, and then said that he knew that it had something to do with him, but that he couldn't remember what it was.

And when I read that story, this long time Democrat, a guy with a whole list of grievances and complaints about Ronald Reagan, well my heart broke and I forgave him everything -- the increased defense spending, the "ketchup is a vegetable", the Iran-contra affair, the "evil empire" rhetoric.  I forgave him it all, gone, water under the bridge, forget about it.

Here was a man that I did not know personally; he only existed to me as a political leader, as a candidate, as the President.  And if he could not remember at all, what was all I remembered him for, then something essential about the man was gone.  How could I hold a grudge?

And that is what Alzheimer's seems to invoke in us, a feeling that the what is essential about a person, is being lost, and that what seems so tragic about the disease, and makes caring for the person so complicated and thankless.  And it is the prospect of losing what seems essential about our selves that makes the disease so terrifying.

Another reason why I humble this morning as I take up this topic is that I know that there are people here who know so much more about this than I do.  And I am not talking about gerontologists now.  As I look out, I can see people all over this sanctuary who have lost husbands, parents, wives and friends to this disease.  I can see people who have been the caretaker for victims of this disease; some have shared their story with me.

So today we are not talking about some far away victims of a natural disaster, or political persecution, or some social injustice. We are talking about suffering and difficulty and despair among ourselves, our community, and a disease which is affecting our lives, and the lives of our friends and neighbors.

The Parish Services Committee has begun to turn its attention to this problem. This is right and good and completely appropriate.  They mean to create within this church, a ministry for those who are living with Alzheimer's and other cognitive problems, a ministry for those who care for them.  They intend to find ways that we can support and surround the families who are touched by this problem, helping them, bringing the resources of generosity and caring to bear on their situation.

Our recently adopted mission and values statement says, among many other things, that we are community trying to live in "right relationship" to each other.  And many people in the discussions about the statement have wondered about that statement -- "what does 'right relationship' mean?"  Well, the Parish Services Committee is going to be leading us through a discussion of what that means in particular, in concrete form.  What does it mean to live in "right relationship" to a someone who is caregiver of an Alzheimer's sufferer?

This is not an easy subject, but a complicated one, and a problem to which we do not already know the answer.  Today's service and the forum which follows are first steps in getting the subject on the table for discussion. Let's start talking openly about Alzheimer's, about other cognitive problems, and how they are affecting our lives in this parish. As the spring and summer and fall progresses, there will be more opportunities to talk about this.  I hope that you are willing to share in those discussions, especially if you have personal experience, or are confronting the situation right now.  Sharing your story, telling what was frustrating and terrifying, and where you could have used some help, would be the greatest gift you could make to our effort to create this ministry right now.

Today, I would like to start that conversation by talking for a bit to try to put our concerns about Alzheimer's into a religious context, to try to make some preliminary meaning out of our present circumstances.

In the largest view, of course, Alzheimer's changes nothing about the essential human condition.  Human beings are born to die.  I am reminded of the person who came out from the city to a small bucolic village, where the air was fresh, the water clean, the food was healthy and locally grown, the chickens were free-range, the vegetables organic.  And the city man was so impressed by how healthy everything seemed that he stopped and asked a local woman -- "what a healthy little garden of eden you have here in this village -- tell me do you know the death rate in this place?"  Well, sir, said the woman, I imagine it’s the same as where you come from -- one per person."

Alzheimer's does not change that essential ratio, but it still scares the heck out of us.  It is not dying of Alzheimer's that is frightening, but living with it, or even living with and caring for someone with Alzheimer's.
Certain diseases and conditions frighten us in different ways. .

Cancer is scary because it starts and grows within you for months before you know about it -- the enemy slips behind your defenses and takes up residence within you and your body betrays you.

In the 1950's, polio caused panic and hysteria because the disease was transmitted in the most innocent of circumstances:  children playing together.

HIV and AIDS are frightening because the disease could be asympomatic for such a long incubation period, and could thus be passed along for months or years without knowing it.

The dread of Alzheimer's is not only in its unpredictability (am I going to get it, or are you?).  It is also frightening because it is associated with something we suffer anyway.  Who doesn't occasionally forget where the car keys were left, or a friend's name, or what exactly you came downstairs to get?  Are these incidents clues to a bleak future? But what is truly terrifying about Alzheimer's is what seems to be the loss of everything that makes you, you or me, me.  I mean, Ronald Reagan forgot that he used to be President of the United States of America.

Alzheimer's causes us to imagine the loss of self-consciousness, which is like imagining your own death.
The first hymn we sang today ended with the words: "a human life when truly seen is briefer than a kiss."  I chose that song because of those words, to help us put this disease in the eternal context.  God never promised us eternal life, at least in this form of existence.  That, because of time and circumstance, more of us will face the end of our lives in the cloud of unknowing that is cognitive loss hardly seems significant, does it?

Every generation faces its own horrors -- war, famine, starvation, plague, AIDS, pestilence -- they change because of history and circumstance, and each generation must play the cards that are dealt it.  (The only reason that we even get to worry about Alzheimer's is that we lucked out on that nuclear war thing that haunted my childhood.)  So, we will play the cards that have been dealt us, and try our best to rise the human challenge that Alzheimer's presents to us, to try to think through the issues of long term care, and financing long term care, and caring for the caregivers, while working on medical research for better treatments, cures and prevention.  With luck and effort, we will leave our children a different problem to worry about.

I learned long ago that being indignant about the problems that the universe presents you to work on is not only futile -- it is also profoundly ungrateful.

One of the problems that Alzheimer's presents to us to think about is how and why we value people.

One of the things that the Aaron Alterra comments on is how difficult it was for him to give up on the notion of his wife Stella learning.  She was not going to learn from experience; she was not going to learn through explanation.  She was not going to "get it" someday.  How much we value people for their potential?
And how much do we value people because of their intelligence, their ability to keep up their end of the conversation?  Alzheimer's takes that away, too.

And how much do we value people because they like us, remember us, respond to us, are loyal to us?  Aaron Alterra's realization that his wife would hardly notice it if he were to die before her was sobering in that regard, wasn't it?

A member of the Parish Services Committee wrote up the story of a friend of her family, a woman who cared for her husband through Alzheimer's.  One day, the wife asked him, if he knew who she was.  "Sure", he said, "you work here!"

Are we still obligated by relationships when our partner no longer recognizes the relationship?  Somehow, we are.

Why is it important to visit someone who forgets who you are and why you come and may forget that you were there as soon as you leave?

Why should the church remember someone who doesn't remember the church?

For the same reason that we play with babies, that we fuss over little William Nicholson, who will never remember our faces and our little koochie koochies koos.   For a community to live in right relationship with itself includes wrapping its caring arms around each of us, from the moment that a baby is announced and anticipated through the final stages of life, no matter how clouded and unknowing they may be and into death itself.  We are community and all are valuable to us, whether they know of us or not.

But may I suggest a deeper reason. Alzheimer's, you see,  raises the question of consciousness itself.
There is a passage in the gospel of John (chapter 14, verse 2 if you must) in which Jesus is depicted as saying that "In my father's house, there are many dwelling places."

I had always wondered what it meant
until I heard it interpreted at the bedside of a patient in a coma,
interpreted by the patient's wife.
Her husband no longer lived in the same dwelling place as she did, she explained.

She could no longer talk with him, nor did she know if he could hear her when she spoke.
Although his body was right there, he seemed to be somewhere else.
But she did not despair, for Jesus had said that "In my father's house, there are many dwelling places."  Her husband lived in another of those dwelling places and while he may have been lost to her, she knew that he was not lost to God.

You see, Jesus told her
that nobody was ever lost to God,
not in life, not in death and certainly not in any of those states of consciousness that seem --  to us  --  to lie somewhere between life and death,
not in a coma, and not, my friends,
in that cloud of unknowing that is final stages of Alzheimer's.
Never beyond the loving arms of faith
Never beyond the reach of right relationship
Never lost to God.

It is that faith in the completeness of human life, the wholeness of the universe, the holiness of all and of each one, that faith guides the work of this ministry created by the people of this parish.  May it blessed and be so.