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By Root 734 0

—but didn’t bring a written sermon to read, just a few notes scrawled on a bookmark. The lectionary reading for that Sunday was Luke 21:5-19, but I decided that there was too much apocalyptic gloom to read the whole thing. I did read the opening lines about the beauty of the temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus’ dire prediction that “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another,” and also the reassuring words that end the text, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” I said I thought that they, of all the people in town, knew best about endurance, and about what it means to watch things come and go. I mentioned the lovely old department store on Main Street, built in 1906, that had recently been demolished. I knew that some of them had gone in a van to observe its coming down. And—I felt on risky ground here, but I thought it a risk worth taking—they also knew, more than most, what it means to have the temple of the body taken down, to live in bodies that no longer work as well as they would like. A few people nodded; a few smiled wistfully. “But you endure,” I said, “because you know God loves you.” And here, I surprised myself, and some of the residents, by adding, rather forcefully, “You know that you are still beautiful in the eyes of God.”

I hadn’t thought about it beforehand, but the elderly don’t often get told that they’re beautiful. Not much that comes on the large television set in the corner of the recreation room tells them that; not much in the magazines on the reading rack. Even if I hadn’t believed what I was saying, it would have been worth saying, just to see the expressions on their faces. It was an inspiring moment, for me and for them. Later, after coffee and visiting and lots of old-time stories, when I joined the Presbyterian women in cleaning up, and we were talking, one marveled at how her great-grandmother was able to live totally in the past. “I remember her as she was,” she said, “and it’s hard on me, but she seems content to be this way.”

“It’s a kind of mercy,” another woman said, and the poem of our conversation began to flow. Another added, “They make no distinction between the living and the dead,” and another said, “It must be like eternal life.” My flippant demons wanted to add, “And they’ll never have to fill out another income tax form,” but I resisted.

I thought of a passage in Esther deWaal’s Seeking God, a book that changed my life. She had helped me to understand what I loved so about Benedictine liturgy, and allowed me to see that it was also what I love about coming to the nursing home. “The geriatric ward in which so many older people now end their days is inescapably full of pain and distress. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise. Yet, bound as most of us are by the relentless demands of the clock and the calendar, we find here a world which accepts another kind of time, where requests and reminiscences repeated endlessly remind of us of something which the Orthodox liturgy knows with its continual repetitions again and again and again. These people [who] many would prefer to banish and forget, might be speaking to us . . . of that time outside time of which we need a constant reminder.”

Isaiah’s seraphim sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and in the landscape of worship around God’s throne, John, too, sees them, four living creatures, “full of eyes all around,” who are full of song. “Day and night without ceasing they sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).

ONE

MAN’S LIFE

I first heard that Kevin was missing on the “Prayer Chain,” when I called home to get my phone messages. The “Prayer Chain” is a telephone tree of church members, and when there are deaths in the congregation, or when people have requested prayers before surgery, or for any other reason, the prayer chain goes into action. My husband and I were at a Benedictine monastery in North Dakota, not far from home, and we puzzled over the message: Kevin, a young, affable, devoted family man and hard worker, a truck driver, was missing. This