The Ministry of Healing and the Gospel of Hope - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Hope and Healing at the Grave

For several years I visited Phyllis. My visits with her began after she began to live in a local nursing home.  She and her son Paul were faithful parishioners in the parish where I had served as assistant curate and later as associate priest.  I never really knew Phyllis before she began to experience dementia, but as I got to know her through my visits in which she and Paul and I shared the sacrament of Holy Communion, it became clear that her decline would be a slow one. 

Phyllis’s entry into the nursing home came not too long after Paul lost his job.  Such an unexpected event always has a traumatic effect on one’s life, and here Paul was faced with a double loss – the sudden loss of his job and the gradual loss of his mother.  One thing I learned about Paul very early on, though, was that he truly believed that all things work together for good for those who love God.  While Paul deeply grieved both losses that were taking place in his life, he chose to use the time he was given to care for his mother, and not simply to care for her practical needs, but to be her constant companion during her journey.  He committed to being with her, loving her, and journeying with her during her final days, even if it came to the point where she wouldn’t know him. 

Is there any healing when we know that know that an illness like Alzheimer’s can only end in one way?  Is there any healing when a disease eats at the body and mind and the only relief from that pain is release in death?  One of the things that Paul and I often discussed was how his mother simply couldn’t be the way she ever was again, and yet, she was still his mother, she was still Phyllis, and her presence amongst us was still a gift from God.  It was truly remarkable how Paul took that reality to heart and how that reality began to shape and provide meaning for him in what was clearly a very difficult time.  It is not that he did not shed any tears and it was not that seeing his mother decline was not hard for him, but in all of that he counted himself blessed to be able to be so intimately connected with his mother in a new and unexpected way. Paul took up a sort of diaconal ministry to her.  It was not so much a ministry of caregiving, although caregiving was involved, but a ministry of self-offering in deep joy and love, and a ministry of presence.  In this, what was most remarkable was that Paul was able, with God’s grace, to appreciate and treasure the moments in which he and his mother connected, and in which his mother connected with the world around her.  Sometimes it would just be in a smile.  Sometimes it would be when she would mouth a line of the Lord’s Prayer, the twenty-third psalm, or utter an “amen” after she received the Sacrament.  Sometimes it was in the squeezing of his hand.  As Paul and I talked about these things, he came to realize that these were moments in which the eternal was breaking through into the present moment.  Phyllis’s notion of linear time had disappeared, she only knew “moments.”  She would forget a moment soon as it had passed.  The challenge for Paul was to take those moments as “timeless moments” as “eternal moments.”  Paul found joy in those moments and what he discovered, and what I discovered as I journeyed with them, was that these fleeting moments were indeed prophecies of the New Jerusalem, sacraments of the Kingdom of God.  If such fleeting moments were so powerful, so joyful, so hopeful, how much more so is God’s eternal kingdom?  In those moments God’s kingdom came on earth as it does in heaven.  When the moment passed, when she seemed to disappear once again, Paul had hope that he was not really losing his mother.

Phyllis raised a faithful family. Although Paul’s sister lived on the other side of the country and could only come a few times a year to see her mother, she (and her husband) and Paul and Phyllis were deeply linked in prayer and love.   It began to dawn on me that this is what a Christian life gives us that is so absent from our world today – hope.  It gives us hope where others see only despair.  In the unfolding of the painful reality that was before this family, they were able to see healing in the midst of several painful losses.  The pain that might have overwhelmed them was made manageable, and I would venture to say, transformed by the hope they knew was theirs.  Thus, even in her illness, their mother could teach them something and God could use her to strengthen the faith of this family and the faith of the Church. Indeed, I found my own faith strengthened in their story.  In the frightening changes and chances of this fleeting life, God in Christ is with us.  God in Christ takes the things that would threaten to destroy us and uses them, transforms them with healing power that we might know and experience, and ultimately proclaim the hope of the Gospel.  What is so wonderful about Phyllis’ story though, is that Paul and his sister Susan had a faith that Phyllis had imparted to them. That faith sustained them through her illness, and her death.  The gift of faith that she planted in them had much fruit to bear for healing.

Long after I had left the parish, I received a voicemail message from Paul telling me that his mother had died.  There was a peace in his voice that went beyond the simple relief that a long journey was over.  He and his sister and brother-in-law had been with her when she died.  It was a holy moment for them.  It was a hopeful moment for them.  It was a healing moment for them. When I spoke with them in person Susan told me that as her mother neared death they had felt that Jesus was actually present in the room.  The presence was so strong, she said, that they had thought that their mother had already died.  She had not.  Jesus was there not just for Phyllis but for her family, too.  Not long afterward, Phyllis slipped away.  Susan’s comment to me was, “Dan, Jesus has healed my mother.” 

And so he has, but oh, the wonderful thing about healing is that it is never just one person that is healed. When healing happens a whole community his healed, the gospel of hope is proclaimed, and despair is defeated.  There are some illnesses from which we never recover in this life.  It is easy to say that death frees us, but it is not death that frees us.  Death is the condition that is in fact attempting to destroy us.  It is God that frees us.  So often at funerals we hear the sentiment that a person’s suffering has ended, but how often do we hear proclaimed that our loved one has been healed.  “Death’s mighty powers have done their worst, but Jesus hath his foes dispersed” sings out one of our great ancient Easter hymns.  Susan had it right, Jesus healed her mother, and in the midst of that healing, brought healing and hope to a family who knew much about the way of the cross.  They could commend their mother in a sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, because even in the midst of the illness that overtook Phyllis, God gave us glimpses of eternity that we might not be left in fear or despair, but hope and joy.  God uses even the most fragile amongst us to bring healing and hope to a fragile and doubting world.  Even at the grave we make our song, “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!”