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Joel Moore at Trinity Hospice

Living in the Mystery

In a 15-hour car ride from Iowa to Mississippi, a handful of St. Paul people experienced the mystery of God.

They spanned 30 years of life experience. They ranged from a man weaned on scripture to a woman new to faith. When they crawled into the Honda Pilot in late January, these fellow travelers knew they shared St. Paul membership in common. Along the journey, they became brothers and sisters in Christ.

“I got out my Bible one morning,” says Joel Moore, one of the passengers. That short devotional reading ignited “a three-hour conversation on spiritual things, where everyone had been. No one felt threatened. No one felt their beliefs were inadequate.” In an SUV bound for Mississippi, they became a community.

For Joel, this road-trip community was a miracle, the mystery of God’s power to act in his life and in the lives of others. “This was a spiritual, emotional, and physical journey that I was on.” The journey transported Joel to the Gulf Coast, a place scarred by death and destruction — yet marked by the resilience of the human spirit.

Death is not new to Joel. He is manager of Trinity Pathway Hospice. He works on-call as a deputy coroner in Rock Island County. He is instrumental in leading a support group for the survivors of suicide loss. “Everything I do is tied into death. I see it as a process, an amazing journey. Death is a mystery.”

Serving in Mississippi or sitting at the bedside of a dying patient, Joel has been thinking a lot about mystery lately. He embraces mystery, striving “to know that God is with us, to allow God to use us as a vessel.”

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak is providing inspiration for Joel these days. Palmer writes that “mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart. The deeper we go into the heart’s darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God… Embracing the mystery means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering” on our journey with God.

Mystery. God is a mystery. Life and death are a mystery.

Joel first experienced death at the age of 14 when his brother Scott died by suicide, two days shy of his 21st birthday. “It was a life-shattering event for my family.” It is a mystery why Joel’s faith did not die with his brother. Instead, in the darkness of death he came to appreciate the radiance of life. He entered into a journey that keeps drawing him closer to the mystery of God.

It was a “death and dying” class at Clark College in Dubuque that put Joel on the path to his vocation. That led to training as a registered nurse, work in oncology and hospice, and eventually management of Trinity Pathway Hospice where he supervises 40 employees in home-care and residential programs for terminally-ill patients. Colleagues know himto be a skilled clinician, a compassionate caregiver, and a man whose spirituality undergirds all his relationships.

It’s not easy. As hospice worker, Joel sees patients and families struggle with death. As coroner, it is his responsibility to determine the cause and manner of death. Sometimes that means a nerve-racking late-night knock on the door about a car accident or a suicide. He thinks it is “comforting for loved ones to know that the person delivering the news has walked in a similar pair of shoes.”

Being present to the dying — and the living who remain — is holy work. Old wounds may be reconciled. Relationships can be renewed. Through it all, Joel listens. To a heart rate slowing, to the silence that fills a room with comforting presence. “You can sense God in every death. I don’t get weighed down because I believe in the life everlasting.”

Joel’s vocation, first and foremost, is to live as a child of God — to “wait, watch, listen, and suffer” (in Parker Palmer’s words) so that he might sense what “God has in store for his journey.”

Through experiences like the Gulf Coast Mission and 40 Days in the Word, which Joel had a hand in planning, God has the power to shape Joel and the people of St. Paul. “I see people diving into the mystery of God, not just being a presence at St. Paul but reaching across barriers, understanding the gifts they have to share.”

One day in Mississippi, Joel worked in the medical clinic. Outside an exam room, he watched a man writing down scripture verses that were painted on the wall. “Do you have a Bible?” Joel asked the man. When Joel handed him one of the gift Bibles available at the clinic, the “gentleman just lit up.” “Let me show you my favorite Bible verse,” said the man, turning to Ephesians 2:10. Joel listened:

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus…”
Says Joel, drinking in the mystery: “It was one of those moments. I was living and breathing God’s workmanship in Mississippi.”

He keeps listening. To every liturgy and hymn in worship, to God’s Word in scripture, to each person he comes in contact with. It’s a mystery, says Joel. But it is in the listening that he discovers God.

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"Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go." ~Mother Teresa