Tues Feb 19 Lenten Post At the Nursing Home

What I saw at the Nursing Home

I stopped to see someone at the Bethany care center tonight and supper hour was still in progress. I was struck by the feel, or the reality, or even the spirit of that experience , people sitting next to others, around tables, slowly feeding someone next to them. So simple. So necessary. I was thankful for the view of the interaction. Are they volunteers, and staff; are they adult children feeding their frail fathers and mothers, a husband with a wife? Was that a grandchild?

When we were children, someone fed us. Life coming full circle. We need others. We need the daily attending of someone, with our spilling and shaking hands. Independence would have us starve. We need others to be with us in patience. And to fulfill that need is humanity at its best. It really is the essential human condition that we are able to disguise or deny for so much of our life. Community cannot exit without it.
Then after I made my visit, I noticed that the beautiful and spacious chapel, that evening, was being set up for a kind of bowling game. The pins were set up, and a long plastic runner formed an alley. Right down the center aisle. I have led worship services on that very spot. I have stood there for memorial services. Some voices of the church, over the years would have been appalled at just the thought of a worship space being used as a bowling alley. But it all seemed right. This seemed no less holy than the times when we sang the hymns, read the scriptures, prayed and preached the Word.
Community mixing ; happening, with attention again, , and care, maybe some laughter and encouragement, or just something out of the ordinary in a place where routine and long hours can be deadening. I am prayerfully thankful for those who minister there, with the people of those rooms and halls. It seemed so right to have that "activity”in the sanctuary space. Can a place of worship not be a place of community and the transcendence of forgetting the earthiness of time, that turns the ordinary into some other level of play? Reverence can be more largely defined. Thomas Merton reminded us that you cannot have God without having humanity.
I saw humanity there in that God space. Did I see God too in that fragile and complicated human space? I think that is what I saw at the nursing home.
It will be my Lenten prayer of thanks.