[This essay first appeared in a 1992 winter issue of Fairfacts, the newsletter of the Fairfax Nursing Center in Virginia, where Hank served as chaplain.]
Photo by Ardian Lumi on Unsplash
I am terminally practical and CHEAP. As l thought of dressing up for the annual Halloween costume parade at the nursing center, l had hoped to find something I could wear again. Then I realized I had been getting into Country and Western dancing since last spring. Bingo! I’d dress up as a cowboy.
I already had a pair of $19 boots (well, that’s what I paid for them while I was a freshman at the University of Florida in 1967). l bought my black jeans on sale at Sears for $10. I still needed a shirt and hat. I’ll spare you the details of shopping for these items, but my whole outfit did not cost over $50 and did l look good.
I was pleasantly surprised by the effect the costume had on women. A week after I put my cowboy ensemble together, I was dancing with a young woman from my church at a country dancing spot we both frequent. She said she liked my hat, then added, “I can’t wait to tell my mother I was dancing with a Southern Baptist minister.”
I guess her mother remembered the days when Southern Baptists didn’t dance because it might lead to worse forms of evil. I’m glad those days are past. I would hate to have my spirituality put into question just because I enjoy dancing.
The costume parade
From the Fairfax Nursing Center newsletter
The day of the costume parade at the nursing center arrived. I sauntered down the halls in my boots, black hat, and black attire. (I am guessing that is what cowboys do — “saunter.”) Once again, the cowboy outfit got attention in ways my normal work clothing never did. All was going well until, halfway through the parade, one of the elderly, female residents saw me and exclaimed, “Hank? Is that you? Dressed like THAT? And you’re a minister?”
At the time, I let it pass. But as soon as I saw this dear, old friend the following Monday she called me over and said, “I’m really sorry for what I said on Friday.” I couldn’t remember until she reminded me. She added, “It’s okay for ministers to dress like that. Will you forgive me?”
I said, “Oh, that was nothing. I didn’t let it bother me. Yet, I do think it is unfair that ministers are not expected to have a little fun and dress up on Halloween, even if it is a cowboy dressed in all black.” I told her I just wanted to be a real person. Approachable and down to earth.
Here’s the Advent part
Photo by Andreas Rasmussen on Unsplash
My breaking the rules of convention of what is expected of a minister has its theological grounding in the Christmas story. In the Christian tradition, God broke many of the rules in becoming embodied in Jesus, starting in Bethlehem. A savior born to a peasant? In a stable? Welcomed by lower-class shepherds?
This child would grow up and break the sacred Sabbath laws. He would say to live you must die. To receive, you must give away. And to be welcomed into the kingdom, you must welcome those rejected by the conventional religious wisdom.
The thought that God was in Christ suddenly lifts our humanity into the very presence of the divine. Cowboy boots and all.
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Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together, they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.
“When I’m dead, I’m dead.… and I just sail off into nothingness, and that brings me a lot of comfort. That doesn’t bring everyone comfort but it brings me comfort.” —Caitlin Doughty, author of 
Two months after he died, Ernest Becker won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book The Denial of Death. I guess, since he was dead, he was not a winner, but his book was.
I’ll get to Becker’s deathbed below but first a few quotes from his classic. Note that Becker wrote in 1973 just as we were becoming aware that we no longer refer to all humans as “man.” I know better now but I will let his original words stand.
Soon after The Denial of Death arrived in late 1973, Sam Keen, one of the editors at the prestigious Psychology Today magazine, called Becker’s home hoping to set up an interview. Keen explained how the deathbed interview came about: “I called his home in Vancouver to see if he would be willing to tape a conversation. His wife Marie informed me that he had just been taken to the hospital and was in the terminal stage of cancer. The next day she called to say that Ernest would very much like to do the conversation if I could get there while he still had strength and clarity. So I went to Vancouver with speed and trembling, knowing that the only thing more presumptuous than intruding into the private world of the dying would be to refuse the invitation.”
When I first walked into the home, I sat alone with the wife in the living room. She was very comfortable talking about her husband’s impending death. I asked her, “What is all this about not wearing our pins or talking about death? Does your husband know he is dying?” She said, “Oh, yes, he knows he is dying.” I asked, “How do you know he knows?” She responded, “Because he asked me.” I asked how she responded to him and she had told him, “Not while I’m around.”
Can we know what God wants? I was drawn to this story reading the pleas for people of faith to pray for a miracle when one could read between the lines and understand that this man was dying.
The family saw this as a sign of God’s intervention. The skeptic might say, “God did not decide the patient should not die during that code. Human intervention went against what seemed to be God’s plan.”
May 7th, Update! “The doctors are continuing to try and prepare me for the worst. And I continue to explain to them that [we] are people of faith and that our God has the final say. I am not in denial about what’s happening to him or blind to what the medical reports say…. I just know that the God I serve is greater than any infection and more powerful than any organ failure.”
As I have done for the last 25 years, I quickly opened the most recent annual 
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.… Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning
I had a brother who died a week after being born when I was six years old. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I asked my mother about Randy’s death. When I did, she burst into tears and said, “My father wouldn’t let me go to his graveside burial service.” I never knew she kept such grief just below the surface. I told this 
I’ve witnessed this type of grief firsthand. I was a nursing home chaplain; a co-worker lost a teenage son to a hit-and-run accident. She believed it was murder, but the driver was acquitted at trial. She, understandably, became obsessed with this loss. She even bought a house next to the cemetery so she could always look out on her son’s grave.