I feel privileged to be lighting the chalice on a Sunday with Michael speaking, and I look forward to what he has to say, especially after my own recent hospital visit.

When doctors would tell me their mandatory worst-case scenario of what could go wrong, I never paid much attention.

Those were the things that happened to other people.

They never happened to me.

I was in good shape, and I was exempt.

Then I went into the hospital for a minor procedure.

Minimally invasive, they said.

I was supposed to be out in three days.

But during the procedure, a spot at my heart began to bleed.

In that moment, the procedure became something more than minor.

A one-inch incision became a six inch one, a four inch incision was made in my groin to hook me up to a heart-lung machine so they could deflate my heart and work on the spot that was bleeding.

The jaggedness of the scars suggest the surgeon was in a hurry.

I didn't know about any of this until I woke up, and then when my surgeon told me, it didn't mean much.

I was alive, they'd finished the procedure, and the chances of it working or not working hadn't changed.

So what if the incisions were bigger.

They'd heal.

After working at getting better and getting back to the exercising I’d been doing, my body would be in the shape it had been.

I wasn't worried.

Then around 8 o'clock the next night, my pulse rate and blood pressure plummeted.

I knew this was bad, and the reaction of the staff told me I was right.

I was quickly moved to intensive care, and had plenty of attention for the next 7 hours.

At one point, someone called out my blood pressure as 72 over 40-something, and I knew I was in trouble.

Part of my theology, such as it is, is that you try to change what you think can impact and are willing to work at, and you accept the rest.

That night, there was little I could do to change things, so I accepted the fact that I might not live through the night.

The curious thing was that I didn't mind dying as much as I minded having my final view in life be of that stark, white hospital ceiling, and my final human contact be a staff of impersonal strangers bustling around me.

At that moment, I felt huge appreciation for the hospice concept.

But I lived, and thought, okay, now it's time to just get better.

But then there was another setback, and then another, and then another.

With each one, it became harder to accept what I couldn't change, as I spun further out of control.

I had to admit that it was control I never really had in the first place.

Illusion died, or at least went into a coma.

I don't mean to dismiss will.

I believe will is a hugely powerful force, and my will was working overtime.

But while that gave me a chance, it didn't give me control.

Even the healthiest can have a streak of bad luck that they don't walk away from, and more than once in the two weeks I was in the hospital, I was feeling that I might well end up being proof of this.

All I could do was resign myself to the path. I was scared sometimes, and I had no control, but I would fight, and I would live until I died.

I light the chalice this morning for all of us, who will live until we die.