Tumbledown Memories by Larry Pray

Rev. Larry Pray, author and stroke survivor, spoke with HopeandHealing.org about his rehabilitation process and how churches are places of healing.

HopeandHealing.org: Can you talk a little about the inspiration and events leading up to Leading Causes of Life?

LP: I had two strokes a few years ago and needed to give up parish ministry. In the aftermath, I have been writing. Gary Gunderson and I wrote the Leading Causes of Life together. When I first met Gary, he had written Boundary Leaders. I told him that I could help him root the ideas in that book with the experience of actual people. We began to work together and I did a batch of interviews for that book. One day we were on a conference phone call and he said, “I’m tired of chasing death, I want to understand life – what are the causes of life.” And I said to myself, that’s an interesting thought. I didn’t even ask him, I just started writing.

After my stroke – by all medical information – I should have died. I could not speak in my own voice. I could not recognize myself. I could not read a clock or do a subtraction problem. In rehabilitation, the purpose is not to recover who you were; the purpose is to discover who you are going to be – huge difference. Rehab is ill-named. I was within an inch of falling off the edge of this life, what matters? The book gave me a chance to focus on what are – in fact – the leading causes of life.

HH: Could you speak more about your rehabilitation?

When you’ve lost virtually everything, and everything that you knew is no longer recognizable, what happens to God in that process? I frequently tell people that in the hospital the nurse asked me to look at the clock and tell her what time it was. I thought, "That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard of in my life; I’m 50-years old and I could tell time since I was a child." But to tell time on a clock you have to make sense of the relation between big hand, number, little hand. If you can’t read those three things, you can’t tell time. And I looked at the clock and – I couldn't tell the time. You can’t imagine that feeling.

What else is relational in life? People, friends and God. Prayer is a relational thing: God, here I am and there you are, let’s talk. That’s a relational thing. If all of the cells in your brain that handle this have died, then there is no capacity for it. I realized that it is an aspect to the journey that everybody with Traumatic Brain Injury goes through that nobody had written about. I’ve written a book about this experience entitled The Geography of Healing.

In my life and in most lives, the hospital, bless its heart, is not a place of healing. It is a place to go to learn how our life has changed. OK, here is the CAT scan, you’ve lost half of your brain. See ya kid, here’s the bill. Where then do we heal? What is the geography of healing? We heal out there. I love the word geography because it’s not just a city or a building in a city; it is wide, it has mountain ranges. There is a geography that we cross as we heal.

Hospitals, for good reason, portray themselves as places of healing, even though the healings, for the most part, happen out there. Therefore, what the medical community thinks about out there is important. They must pay attention to what happens to their patients when they are released into the world. Churches need to be deeply aware of how they are in fact an integral player in the geography of healing, and for the most part, I don’t think they understand that. It’s not that they don’t care. I’m not sure that they have perceived themselves as the healing community that they in fact are.

HH: Could you talk a little bit about what you believe the role of the congregation is in health and wellness?

LP: The congregation is a place that people heal. So somebody is 95-years old, falls and breaks a hip, gets a new hip, goes to a nursing home for a while and then comes home and reconnects. And what does the church do? They mow her lawn or they take over food, but more importantly they honor her presence, tell her that she matters. Healing should not be a lonely experience.

In Montana, we developed a cancer group in our little church. It didn’t serve people in our congregation too much; most of the people who came had nothing to do with the church. Twice a month we would meet and we would laugh, cry or we would talk about, “Oh, your hair is falling out everywhere.” We would talk about the future and how are we living with this disease. Sometimes I would give a prayer after. In a time where death came near to them, somebody needed to talk about life. That somebody is the churches.

HH: One last question. Is there a spiritual, biblical, or historical leader that you look up to or find inspiration from?

LP: In Genesis, Jacob said “surely God is in this place and I did not know it.” After my stroke, when the capacity for prayer disappeared, it helped to know that 3,000 years ago a man named Jacob said, “Me too, surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Rev. Larry Pray is a pastor in the United Church of Christ.  He is the co-author with Gary Gunderson of Leading Causes of Life. He also is author of the blog Praytell: the Geography of Healing.

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