During the four years of Betsy’s cancer (see “When Your Friend Is Dying”), her husband continued in full-time ministry. An inside look:
Monty Burnham’s pastoral honeymoon was not yet over when he was sledgehammered with the surgeon’s report. He had moved his family less than eight months before from the sun and surf of Monterey Peninsula to the narrow streets of metropolitan Boston, where the 250-year-old United Presbyterian Church of Newton awaited his ministry.
The congregation had been a historic downtown church until 1946, when it bought an imposing Gothic edifice only two blocks outside the city limits. The 550 active members had managed a two-year interim and were now eager to move forward under the leadership of this personable Californian. A former Young Life staffer (nine years), Burnham had most recently been an associate pastor. This would be his first senior position.
“One of the harder parts of being in the ministry during such an ordeal,” he says quietly, “is that you’re so public. You’ve made a commitment to be Christ’s servant through everything-and now everyone’s watching.”
The Burnhams made little attempt to keep a stiff upper lip, to hide their trauma from onlookers. “We treated the church as our family. We shared the prognosis on Sunday morning and kept people informed all along the way. If there seemed to be light in the tunnel, we rejoiced together. At one point, we dared to say Betsy was in remission and even healed.
“But when we were in despair, we shared that as well. I preached a good deal those years on suffering, how God purifies us in the crucible.”
One result was an outpouring of love and practical support from the congregation, as Betsy’s book describes. “I felt like the paralytic in the Gospels being carried by his friends,” says Monty. “We were borne along on a flood of mail and phone calls.” At the same time, the demands of ministry pulled him outside his private crisis, forcing him to run on two tracks simultaneously. The result was greater fatigue but also more perspective.
“We had basically two good years and two grim years-not in sequence, but mixed back and forth. When Betsy felt strong, we made the most of the time, going to plays and films, taking trips together, eating out, stopping to smell the flowers. When she was battling the pain-both the cancer and the pain of the cure-I wanted nothing so much as to be at her side.
“It was like the crisis of having a new baby in the house-you don’t have time to ponder, you just work. How I got through I don’t know-it was a gift of grace. I learned, however, that we are like camels; we carry a great resource within us. I used to think spiritual manna was only for today, and that if you didn’t feed on the Word every twenty-four hours, you would starve. Not so, at least in my time of pressure.”
Monty continued to preach three Sundays each month (Assistant Pastor Dennis Doerr preached the fourth) straight through, breaking off only when Betsy’s death became imminent. “Wednesday is my sermon preparation day,” he says, “and I held to that rhythm unless she needed to be taken to chemotherapy or if I simply couldn’t concentrate. There were Wednesdays when I’d finally just go work in the yard instead and come back to the sermon on Saturday. The fear of not being ready would eventually get me moving, and I’d always rally for the next day.” During the four years, Burnham did no recycling of old sermons; each week’s message was a new preparation.
Betsy was there to hear him preach as late as November, 1981, two months before her death. “Her commitment to ministry was as strong as mine,” says her husband. “She wasn’t the type to demand my time when the needs of the church called. If anything, I was the one who would be struck by depression and suddenly lose energy. At those times, I would just leave the office to go be with her.”
But while preaching continued, other things fell away. The first to go was Monty’s chairmanship of the local Young Life board, and then his hospice work. “Both of those had been so central to our lives back in California,” he explains, “but there wasn’t the time or energy to continue.” Eventually he felt forced to resign as vice-moderator of the Boston Presbytery only two months before he would become moderator. He did, however, carry through as chairman of counseling and follow-up for the Billy Graham Boston Crusade of early 1982.
The church also celebrated its 250th birthday with a month of special events. A larger kitchen and more rest rooms were added to the building.
Meanwhile, personal time became ever more scarce for the pastor. “I read only half a dozen books in four years,” he confesses, “-one of which was A Severe Mercy by Vanauken. Somebody came to stay with Betsy and the girls not long after her first surgery, and I left to spend three days in a Cape Cod motel. There I faced the fact that, humanly speaking, she had not the ghost of a chance. But the book led me to believe there would be a mercy somewhere in the severity.”
Golf-“my dearest love”-was forgotten, and the tennis club membership the Burnhams had purchased soon after arrival was never used. As the months wore on, Suzanne and Marybeth began to show signs of jealousy. “They felt they’d lost me, too-to Betsy,” Monty says. “They couldn’t find their space in my life.”
Monty now regrets what he feels was misdirected anger. In the face of a terminal illness, “I could always theologize so God didn’t bear the brunt of what was happening. And of course it wasn’t Betsy’s fault. So I sometimes vented on the girls.
“In the past, I had been the disciplinarian, and Betsy the merciful mother. Now, we both seemed to intensify-she grew ever more soft, while I became tougher. We couldn’t seem to get the right synthesis of truth/justice and compassion. It was very difficult at times.”
Some of Monty’s hardest public moments came while officiating at funerals, which occurred as often as once a month. In December, 1981, as Betsy lay waiting for the end, he conducted the funeral of a woman who died of virtually the same kind of cancer. “It was exceedingly difficult,” he remembers. “But I had to face the full range of life experiences.
“After all, I am called to model the gospel as well as share it. The gospel had to be a word of hope to me, too.”
Some who tried to exhort the Burnhams to believe for healing proved to be an irritation. “They didn’t really say it, but they implied, especially through the literature they gave us, that I was the roadblock. I didn’t have enough faith, or I wasn’t saying the right words. Isaiah 53:5 (‘By his wounds we are healed’) became a proof-text.
“Other people urged us to always be strong and victorious. When I would say, ‘I believe God loves me where he finds me, in my humanness and weakness,’ it sometimes caused tension. For these and other reasons, some of them withdrew from the church. The truth is, our active membership sloped to about 450 over the four years. My style of vulnerability didn’t appeal to some, and others felt neglected.”
Burnham’s staff at the church, however, proved not only loyal but valuable as they covered for his absences from the office and conserved his energy. “People gave me a long leash on my schedule,” Monty says with gratitude, “and I’ve never been a clean-desk person anyway. I’m a self-starter who doesn’t need the discipline of the clock-but doesn’t stop to file things, either. Dennis, my secretary Diane, and the others were a great support.”
Monty Burnham did not preach the Sunday of January 10, 1982. He stayed at the bedside of his wife, with whom he would spend only five more days. She was buried on Monday morning, January 18, in subzero temperature with eight inches of snow on the ground. That evening, the congregation packed the church for a memorial service. The choir sang an anthem Betsy had helped create. Suzanne, then sixteen, sang a solo, while Monty and fourteen-year-old Marybeth read Scripture. After the sermon, the worshipers lifted “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and ended with a quiet refrain of “Alleluia.”
Was there a mercy in the severity? Yes, says Monty Burnham, who returned to the pulpit March 7 and continues there today. “It was that we lived Betsy’s dying. Her death came slowly, giving us time to say and do all the important things. We burned more firewood in those years; we listened to more records together. We spent the time being what each other needed. Maybe that’s why we used to get angry-but also sad-watching others throw their marriages away while we were fighting so hard to lengthen ours.
“The pain has not separated me from people. It has drawn me to them. I come with fewer answers now. The further I get from seminary, the more I approach life and people with my heart as well as my head.”
There are still times when emotion overwhelms Monty Burnham in the pulpit, when his throat suddenly tightens and “I’m ambushed by teariness. So many of the hymns, I now notice, have to do with suffering. Communion also seems to trip me up, when I pause to realize she’s sitting at His table at that very moment.”
But such moments do not hinder ministry; they authenticate it. The pastor’s pilgrimage has become a model to all. Eight months after the funeral, Burnham wrote in the church newsletter: “My calendar tells me it is late summer, yet my heart gives evidence of spring. The winter of Betsy’s illness and death is waning. New life is emerging-miraculously, mysteriously-in terrain blanketed by ice and snow.”
After a quotation from Henri J. M. Nouwen’s Letter of Consolation, Burnham concludes, “Please pray for me and help me cultivate the crocuses in my landscape. I offer my new life to Christ, to you, and to the world He loves.”
-Dean Merrill
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
